I tested the use of the GPU (Windows 11, 13th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i7-13700, 2100 Mhz, 16 Core(s), 24 Logical Processor(s), Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti to unmix song (Vocals, Guitar, Bass and Drums - quality High) .)
I changed the GPU usage in Preferences from Auto to CPU and then GPU. In each case it took the same amount of time - about 5 mins. I then tried SL11 using the Extreme setting. It took 2.5 minutes - certainly the quality was not as good but it used the GPU as expected.
So I guess the issue is not just with AMD and Radeon (or Mac)
I have a Mac Studio M4 running the latest OS. SL12 seems to run slower than SL11, but I have not really tested this. I do know that when I set up an Unmix on a 4 minute song, SL12 took over 4 minutes. This is a song with only Vocals, Guitar, Piano, Bass, and Sax. When I switched into background mode (ie, I started reading email), then came back to SL12, the time window had now changed to 16 minutes - although once I remained on the page, it sped up. The point I want to make is that SL12 did a lousy job of creating the Sax stem. Therefore, I want to report this as a bug. (When you advertise an app, and you have demos online that show how fantastically the new SL12 creates Sax stems, but then it doesn’t, that is a bug. I don’t know what else to call it.) In my post elsewhere, I pointed out that I was able to successfully create stems for the same song in Logic Pro 11.2 - including a far superior Sax stem - in about 4 seconds. This was NOT in any way meant to start the age-old Apple vs PC debate, it was just to make a comparison on my own system of what works and what does not. To those commenters who told me how the Logic Pro stem splitter is very elementary - I agree! That is my point exactly! If SL12 is indeed a far superior app (as it clearly claims to be) than it should be performing that way.
I’m finding the same as other Mac users on my Mac M2 Mini Pro with 16GB RAM. A 3 minute track that takes Logic 11.2 less than 2 minutes to unmix takes around 30 minutes in SpectraLayers 12. In many cases to Logic result is better. I’m on a trial of SL12, so I hope Steinberg can sort something out before it expires.
Unmixing a 3min song takes 8min on my Macbook Air M3, so there’s something wrong happening on your mac indeed. Do you keep SL in the foreground and active during the unmixing, or is it working in the background ?
Thanks, that’s good to know. I’ve been doing a mix of foreground and background processing, but will try to do more systematic tests. For my usage it’s no big deal to pull the Logic Pro stems into Cubase, but it would be good to get SpectraLayers at some point.
GPU acceleration works fine on Windows, but some users have had difficulties with their specific combinations of Windows hardware. I can personally verify that NVIDIA RTX 3050 and RTX 5060 cards work fine.
Mr.Soundman……Dammit!! That’s an incredible machine you have there.
I’m Win11 PC on an older i7 machine using an 8G AMD Pro WX7100 graphics card ($54-$80 on eBay) and unmixing a 5 minute Ronnie Earl song (Look Over Yonders Wall/Eye to Eye album) with vocal, drums, bass, guitar, and piano (slight add of B3 at the end). Using the ‘balanced’ setting, it took 7 minutes, and, although the time can’t compete with your machine the isolation quality of the SL Unmix Song setting is fantastic. SL12 IMO definitely does a better job of Unmix Song than SL11. If Robin and his team can knock a couple of minutes off the time, well, this would just be an added bonus. I can live with this. And btw, AMD is still creating new drivers for this graphics card, the latest one is dated 3/6/2025 - 31.0.2193.1000 (Pro 25.Q2) DCH/Win11 64.
On a PC with with NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, a 4min live recording with drums, bass, vocals, piano and guitar, Unmix Song at “High”:
SL12.0.10: 1m 28s
SL12.0.20: 1m 11s
One thing that seems different is that the dialog box at first appears blank, and only after about 15 seconds the progress bar appears. If I time the process from when the progress bar appears, then it only takes less than a minute, so about 4 times faster than realtime. Nice!
I also notice in SL12.0.20 that the GPU RAM is now completely utilized and that the GPU usage is up to about 70-80% on average throughout the process.
