iZotope Photon splits stems on your GPU instead of in the cloud
iZotope’s new Photon runs 12 custom models locally to separate stems, isolate vocals and clean up noisy recordings. It costs $349, or $259 until December 7.
iZotope has launched Photon, a stem separation and audio cleanup tool that processes files on your computer’s GPU instead of uploading them to a server. It runs on 12 custom-trained machine-learning models and is the first collaboration between iZotope and its parent company, Boris FX.
The models fall into two groups, Demix and Denoise. Demix handles separation. Music splits into four stems, and drums break into five: kick, snare, hi-hat, toms and cymbals. A Voice Separator detects up to six voices in a recording and gives each its own stem. A separate Voice algorithm pulls a vocal out of music for quick instrumentals or acapellas. A Cinema model divides a video or audio file into dialogue, music, sound effects and everything else.
Denoise has three models. Voice Restore enhances speech and handles noise. Indoor and Indoor Noisy deal with room noise and reverb. Outdoor, Outdoor Traffic and Outdoor Wind target street noise and heavy wind.
Photon comes as a standalone app and as an ARA2 plugin, so stems can be adjusted or background noise fixed inside a DAW. iZotope says you can run several models together and switch between them without waiting. Supported hosts are Pro Tools, REAPER and Cubase on Mac and Windows, plus Sequoia and Samplitude on Windows. A preview function is meant to speed up work on longer clips, and a Model Manager downloads new and updated models without a reinstall.
Photon opens WAV, MP3, FLAC, AIFF, AAC, M4A, MP4, MKV, MOV, MXF and MPG files. For video it reads the audio track and can write the processed audio back. Exports go to WAV, FLAC and MP3, or to video with the original video stream kept.
Photon is available now for Apple Silicon Macs and machines running Windows 10 or later. It costs $349, or $259 in a cyber sale that runs through December 7.
