RipX DeepRemix
AI-powered audio extraction for music makers
There’s a lot of potential and power here, but RipX has a steep learning curve
£79 FROM Hit’n’Mix Ltd, hitnmix.com NEEDS macOS 10.10 or later
RipX is related to the same developer’s Infinity, an audio studio that enables you to extract and manipulate audio. This is more focused and more affordable. It enables you to extract vocals or instruments from MP3s and other audio formats and then mix them with other samples. You can also export the stems (individual files for each audio track) for use in a digital audio workstation such as Logic Pro X or Ableton Live.
There’s some powerful technology here but it’s wrapped in a pretty horrid interface; we’ve seen the PC version and that isn’t brilliant but the Mac version is worse. It’s a wall of black pixels occasionally punctuated by tiny text, some of which is mid-blue; light mode changes the main editing panel from black to grey but the rest of the interface remains blue and white on black.
RipX isn’t optimised for M1 processors – system requirements are macOS 10.10 or later – and that’s apparent when you rip audio: on a 16GB M1 MacBook Pro it took between 9 to 28 minutes to extract the vocal or drum track from a commercially released song. The app does enable you to queue multiple files in multiple formats so you can start it ripping while you do something else.
RipX treats the audio in a very similar way to apps such as Melodyne or the Flex Pitch in Logic Pro. You can move notes or phrases, change the pitch or tempo and add effects. You can have lots of fun with the toolkit here as you detune guitars or finally get the lead vocal to sound right.
Extraction issues
The big selling point here is the audio extraction, which we found delivered mixed results. At the highest-quality settings we had great results with drum tracks, especially on hip-hop and dance music, but our vocal results were often disappointing. When we tried ripping vocals from rock songs the app correctly isolated the singing but the resulting WAV was very heavily phased with a lot of unwanted swooshing in the higher frequencies; Eminem appeared to be calling us via Skype on a really bad connection. On quieter tracks we often encountered very noticeable harmonics, as if we’d stuck the singer’s mic through an octave/harmoniser pedal. The app does have tools you can use to try and remove the phasing and other problems, such as noise or unwanted frequencies, but we found them ineffective.
If you’ve already got stems to play with, though, RipX is a lot of fun. There are lots of tools to completely transform your audio, for example by adding extreme harmonics, tuning the notes to a particular semitone or changing its tempo, and the app is scriptable: its RipScripts use Python. There’s a lot of potential here but the learning curve is steep. Carrie Marshall