Split a song into drums, bass, vocals, and instruments
Pull isolated parts out of any sample, remix the levels, and send just the part you want to a pad.
Any sample in Best Friend can be split into its parts: drums, bass, vocals, guitar, and instruments. From there you can remix the levels between them, mute a part entirely, or send a single isolated part to a pad.
Take the drum break without the horns over it, or the vocal without the beat under it.
Split one
Open a sample, go to the Split Stems tab, and tap Split stems. The separation model ships inside the app: nothing to install, and it runs on your device — no upload, no account.
A single progress bar takes you through it: Loading model…, Processing audio…, Splitting stems…. A fifteen-second section takes tens of seconds, not minutes.
There is no cancel, by design. The progress bar holds the screen until it finishes; leaving the screen abandons the split.
It splits your crop, not the whole file
Best Friend separates the trim you have set, not the whole import. Trimming fifteen seconds out of a five-minute track and splitting that is quick; splitting the whole track would not be.
- Nudging the crop a few seconds either way, or shrinking it, costs nothing: no re-split, the faders stay live, the mix is unchanged.
- Moving the crop well outside the section you split greys the faders and puts Split stems back. Your fader positions are kept behind it, so the re-split comes back with the mix you had rather than resetting to unity.
- Structural changes never cost a re-split: stereo to mono, mono to stereo, repitch, fidelity, and EQ moves all leave the stems intact.
The mix
Each part gets a fader. Double-tap one to send it back to 100.
If you leave every fader at unity, Best Friend bypasses the mixdown entirely and uploads bytes identical to an unsplit upload — so an accidental split costs you nothing in quality.
Stems are session-scoped. Dismiss the editor and they are gone, along with their temporary files; re-opening the same sample offers Split stems again. Nothing accumulates on your device.
How it fits the workflow
- Get the source audio into Best Friend — import from Files, or pull the audio straight out of a video. See Get samples onto your EP in bulk.
- Trim to the section you actually want.
- Split it into stems.
- Remix the levels or mute the parts you do not want.
- Edit the result — crop, normalize, repitch — and send it to a pad.
You can keep the preview playing through all of it. Splitting, muting a part, and moving a fader all happen under the playhead without stopping playback.
Splitting is not bouncing
Two different features:
- Splitting stems (this page) separates parts out of a finished piece of audio. It is an estimate of what was in the mix.
- Bouncing stems exports your own arrangement off the hardware. Every pad that plays comes out isolated from the real samples and pad data — not separation, the actual source audio. Those stems are exact.
If you want your own tracks out of your EP and into a DAW, you want bouncing.
