iZotope Photon runs 12 stem and cleanup models on your GPU, with nothing uploaded

iZotope introduced Photon on 3 November, a standalone app and ARA plugin for splitting finished audio into stems and cleaning it up. It is the first joint research project from iZotope and Boris FX, and it runs 12 custom-trained models on your own GPU. iZotope’s pitch is the absence of the usual cloud limits: no upload, no usage cutoffs and no queue.

Separation is not one job here, and the models are divided accordingly:

• Music 4 Stems and a sharper Ultra version give vocals, drums, bass and everything else.
• Drums 5 Stems splits a drum bus or a full song into kick, snare, hi-hat, toms and cymbals.
• Voice 2 Stems gives voice and music.
• Cinema 4 Stems gives voice, music, effects and other.
• Voice Separator pulls up to six speakers from one recording, plus room tone and background.

The cleanup models are named after the problem: Voice Restore, Indoor, Indoor Noisy, Outdoor, Outdoor Traffic and Outdoor Wind.

Photon works on a file as soon as you jump to a point in it, so a setting can be heard before the whole file is processed. In a DAW, the ARA version sits on the timeline in Pro Tools, Sequoia, Samplitude, REAPER, Cubase and other ARA2 hosts, and it sees the whole clip rather than a live stream. The app also opens video files, including MP4, MOV, MXF and ProRes, and writes the processed audio back without touching the picture.

iZotope positions it next to RX rather than as a replacement: Photon for covering a lot of ground quickly, RX for fixing a single cough by hand.

The hardware is the catch. On Mac it needs macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon, so Intel Macs are out. On Windows it needs Windows 10 or later and a GPU with at least 4 GB of video memory. iZotope recommends 16 GB of RAM. An internet connection is only needed to download new models.

iZotope’s store lists Photon at €284.25, down from €379, and subscriptions normally cost €19 a month or €129 a year. Existing iZotope customers can get crossgrade prices until 7 December.

It arrived in the same week as new stem tools in Cubase 16, Pro Tools 2026.11 and Logic Pro 13, all of which split audio from inside the DAW.