Boris FX has announced Samplitude 2026.5, an update to its standalone DAW that adds a Spatial Panner for stereo, surround and immersive work, a multiband plugin host called BandRack, Stream Deck OSC control, and AI-powered stem separation via CrumplePop SoundApp ARA inside the Arrange Window. The separation offers three modes: Music 4 Stems (voice, drums, bass, other), Cinematic 4 Stems (voice, sound effects, music, other) and Voice 2 Stems (vocals against everything else). Samplitude 2026.5 also scans for compatible VST3 ARA plugins automatically, and adds 32-bit integer export. The announcement is here.
If you have ever tried to pull a drum part out of a dense mix, you already know why this matters. A stem splitter is the single biggest quality lever on a transcription job, and it just moved one step closer to where the audio already lives.
Why a stem splitter inside the DAW matters
Most people who want notation out of a recording do the work in two places. They clean up or isolate the audio in a DAW, export something, then feed it to a transcription tool. Every export is a chance to lose something: a wrong sample rate, a mono fold-down, a truncated tail.
Putting separation inside the DAW removes one of those hops. You open the session, separate, and the stems sit on tracks next to the original. No round trip.
The bigger point is what separation does to accuracy. A drum transcription model listening to a full band is fighting bass guitar, low piano, and whatever the producer smeared across the low mids. Give it a drum stem and most of that competition disappears. Same for bass: a bass stem is far easier to transcribe than a bass line buried under distorted guitars.
That is the practical case for this announcement. Not the spatial panner, not the Stream Deck icons. Separation in the same window as the edit.
What it changes in practice
Here is the workflow this enables, and it is a good one:
| Step | Where it happens | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Separate the mix | Samplitude, via SoundApp ARA | Four audio stems |
| Export the stem you need | Samplitude | A WAV of one instrument |
| Transcribe that stem | A transcription tool | PDF, MusicXML, MIDI |
| Edit and print | MuseScore, Sibelius, Dorico, Finale | A score you can hand out |
Compare that to the old path: bounce the mix, upload it somewhere, separate there, download stems, upload again. Fewer copies of the audio means fewer places for a conversion to go wrong.
The three separation modes are worth reading closely. Music 4 Stems is the one a working musician wants. Cinematic 4 Stems splits voice, sound effects, music and other, which is a post-production layout: useful if you score to picture and need dialogue out of the way, less useful if you are trying to hear what the bass player did. Voice 2 Stems is a karaoke-shaped split.
What it does not change
Separation is not transcription. This is the part that gets lost when a DAW adds a separation feature and the marketing calls it AI.
You get audio files. You do not get notation. Nothing in this announcement produces a PDF score, a MusicXML file, or MIDI. If you want a chart at the end, you still need a transcription step, whether that is our transcriber or your own ears and a pencil.
Second: separation leaves artifacts. Cymbals smear. Reverb tails get pulled into the wrong stem. Heavily compressed or heavily tuned vocals come out with a watery edge. If a part is genuinely ambiguous in the mix, it will still be ambiguous in the stem, and the notation built from it will be confidently wrong. That is the failure mode to watch for: not missing notes, but invented ones.
Third: the feature is edition-dependent. The announcement describes SoundApp ARA as included with Samplitude Suite, not the standard edition. Check which license you hold before you plan around it. The same caveat applies to the Spatial Panner, where surround support tops out at 5.1 in standard Samplitude and 7.1.4 in Suite.
Fourth: the stems belong to a copyrighted recording. Separating a commercial track does not change what you are allowed to do with a transcription of it. A transcription of a copyrighted song is a derivative work. Rules differ by country. If you intend to distribute, sell or perform the result, talk to the rights holder or your local licensing body first. Separation is a technical step, not a legal one.
Our view
This is the right direction and a modest announcement. DAWs have been adding stem separation for a couple of years, and the interesting question was never whether Samplitude would get it. It was whether the separation would be good enough to trust for notation work.
We cannot answer that from a press release. Nobody can. The only honest test is to separate a track you know intimately, transcribe the drum stem, and compare the chart to the record. Do that on three songs in different genres before you build a habit around it. If the separation is clean on a dense rock mix, it earns its place. If it is not, you have lost nothing but an afternoon.
What we would push back on is the framing that separation plus a DAW equals a finished chart. It does not. Separation improves the input to a transcription. The transcription still has to happen, and it still has to be edited by someone who plays the instrument. A drum chart that a model wrote and nobody checked is worse than no chart, because it looks authoritative.
The other open question is where the separated stems land in the session. If they arrive as four clean tracks with sensible names and no destructive processing, this is a genuinely useful feature. If they arrive as a single rendered file or with the source audio already altered, it is a demo. The announcement does not say. Ask before you buy.
Who should care: producers and remixers who already work in Samplitude and occasionally need a chart, and transcribers who do the prep work by hand today. If you are on a different DAW and your only goal is notation, this announcement does not move you. Use a stem splitter directly and skip the middleman.
What to do next
If you are already in Samplitude and on the Suite license, the sensible test is small. Pick a track you can play by ear. Separate it. Transcribe the drum or bass stem. Compare the result to what you know is there. That tells you more than any feature list.
If you are not in Samplitude, nothing here changes your setup. The pipeline is the same as it has been: separate the mix, transcribe the stem you need, edit the notation in MuseScore, Sibelius, Dorico or Finale, export MIDI if you want it in a DAW. Our stem splitter and audio to MIDI converter do those middle steps, and the output opens in any notation program or DAW you already own.
Two things worth reading alongside this. Our piece on Luna 3.0 adding stem separation and chord extraction covers the same trend from a different DAW, and A Stem Splitter That Stops Halfway is a reminder that separation quality varies enormously between tools. If you want to see what finished transcriptions look like before you commit to a workflow, Explore is free to browse.
If you are weighing plans, pricing and plans describes the shape of the offer. We do not restate numbers here because they change.
