Fix your recorded songs

Polish old demos and make new tunes from existing tracks

- CARRIE MARSHALL

APPLE HAS UPGRADED Logic Pro by beefing up its clever Stem Splitter, which enables you to remove parts of existing mono or stereo recordings, or take those recordings and separate their instruments ready for editing, processing, or effects. As before, Stem Splitter takes an audio track and breaks it down to individual components (or stems) so you can split the song into separate tracks for vocals, drums, and bass. Now, it's even better quality, and can separate guitar and piano tracks, and its new submix feature lets you export only the audio you want - for example, disabling vocals automatically creates a vocal-free version of the song, or you can decide to use only the rhythm tracks.

Stem Splitter works with any recording that you've got the copyright owner's permission to use, but it's probably at its most useful with demos. By separating out the tracks, it makes it much easier to see and hear what's happening on each instrument, or to polish away the rough edges of imperfect mixes.