iZotope Photon: GPU stem separation, price, specs

iZotope's Photon uses multiple models on your GPU to split stems and clean up noisy audio. It's available now as a standalone app and ARA plugin.

iZotope has launched Photon, a standalone app and ARA plugin for AI-powered stem separation and audio enhancement that uses 12 custom-trained models and runs locally on the GPU, with no uploads. Perhaps more significantly than that, for the long term at least, Photon is the first collaboration between the iZotope and Boris FX research teams.

It can split music into four stems, separate drums into individual elements [Handy for trying to work out what on earth Danny Carey is up to this time. Drumming Ed], isolate vocals, identify and separate speakers, and clean up noisy recordings. As an ARA plugin, it lets users run several models together and switch between them. Previews can start at any point in a clip. Model Manager downloads new and updated models without a reinstall.

Demix

• Music 4 Stems: 4-stem separation model for music.
• Music 4 Stems Ultra: new 4-stem separation model for music.
• Drums 5 Stems: kick, snare, hi-hat, toms, and cymbals.
• Voice Separator: splits up to 6 speakers from one audio file into individual stems.
• Voice 2 Stems: voice and music.
• Cinema 4 Stems: splits a video or audio file into dialogue, music, sound effects, and everything else.

Denoise

• Voice Restore: handles speech, noise, levels, mic tone, and reverb.
• Indoor / Indoor Noisy: reverb and room noise.
• Outdoor / Outdoor Traffic / Outdoor Wind: models for traffic, urban noise, and heavy wind.

Formats and exports

Exports are WAV, FLAC, MP3, or video in the same format as the source, with the original video stream kept. Photon opens a lot too, namely .wav, .mp3, .flac, .aiff, .aif, .aac, .m4a, .mp4, .mkv, .mov, .mxf, and .mpg files. For video, it reads the audio track and can write the processed audio back.

Photon price and availability

Photon is available now at izotope.com/products/photon, with cyber deals through December 7, 2026. Prices are MSRP, with cyber prices in brackets.

• Photon: $349 ($259)
• Crossgrade from any paid iZotope product: $269 ($179)
• Crossgrade from RX Elements (or any bundle that includes it): $199 ($129)
• Crossgrade from RX Standard (or any bundle that includes it): $149 ($74)
• Crossgrade from RX Advanced (or any bundle that includes it): $99 ($49)
• Subscription: $19/month ($12 first month, then $19/month) or $119/year ($89 first year, then $119/year)

Photon requires macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon (Intel Macs are not supported), or Windows 10 or later, 64-bit, with a GPU of at least 4 GB VRAM. 16 GB of RAM is recommended and 8 GB is the minimum.