Demucs
State-of-the-art music source separation model by Meta for splitting tracks.
About
Demucs, developed at Meta research, separates a mixed music track into individual stems: drums, bass, vocals, and other accompaniment, with an experimental six-source model adding guitar and piano. The fourth version, Hybrid Transformer Demucs, processes spectrogram and waveform representations in parallel through a dual U-Net joined by cross-domain transformer layers, reaching 9.0 dB SDR on the MUSDB HQ benchmark and 9.2 dB with fine-tuning. Separation runs on a GPU with as little as 3 GB of memory, 7 GB recommended, or on CPU at roughly 1.5 times the audio duration. The original repository is no longer maintained after the author left Meta, and continued bug-fix work happens in a community fork, but the MIT-licensed code and pretrained models remain widely used. Musicians, producers, audio engineers, and researchers rely on it for remixing, karaoke tracks, sampling, and dataset preparation.
Should you use Demucs?
Pick it when
Pick Demucs when you need high-quality stems (drums, bass, vocals, other, or six sources with guitar and piano) from a script or command line, with MIT terms for commercial use and CPU or a GPU with as little as 3 GB.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you want a point-and-click app: Ultimate Vocal Remover wraps Demucs and other models in a GUI. Also note the original repo is unmaintained, so bug fixes come from a community fork rather than Meta.
Alternatives to Demucs
- Ultimate Vocal Remover
Desktop GUI with Demucs v4 alongside MDX-Net and VR models plus ensembles, easier for non-coders but less suited to scripted pipelines.
- Spleeter
Much faster, around 100 times real time on GPU, and simple to install, but its older TensorFlow models are a baseline rather than top quality.
- Basic Pitch
Converts audio to MIDI rather than stems, a natural next step after Demucs isolates a part, and it runs on CPU under Apache-2.0.
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Details
- Category
- Music & Audio Generation
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Easy (2/5)
- License
- MIT
- Added
- Apr 3, 2026