Splitting songs into their components is getting progressively easier. In the past, in order to access individual vocal and accompaniment tracks of a song, you either had to purchase the original recordings from the rights holder or try to split the track yourself using sophisticated software designed for professional use.

Now the average user can efficiently extract vocal and instrumental stems in a matter of seconds and without much effort. Thanks to advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, many solutions have emerged on the market offering high stem separation precision combined with a user-friendly interface and overall ease of use.

PhonicMind and LALAL.AI are some of the most popular AI-based services for splitting audio tracks. Both have good online reviews and at a glance, they look and function almost identically. So which service is better? How are they different? Which one should you choose? Let’s take a closer look at the splitters to help you decide.

Accessibility

Both LALAL.AI and PhonicMind are online services and can be used on desktop and mobile. Users of any operating system can access the splitters without having to register, install software, etc. as long as their device has a browser and Internet connection.

Upload & Download Limits

The sites of both services are pretty easy to navigate, with an upload button right on the first page. PhonicMind allows you to upload files up to 100MB in size, whereas LALAL.AI’s maximum upload size is a whopping 2GB.

PhonicMind's Basic plan ($9.99) only allows downloading split stems in MP3 format, while all of LALAL.AI's paid plans enable you to download stems in the same format as the original file, including such audio and video formats as MP3, OGG, WAV, FLAC, AVI, MP4, MKV, AIFF, AAC.

Supported Formats

You can upload songs as MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, WAV, and AIFF files to PhonicMind and download the isolated stems in either FLAC (if you input lossless audio), MP3 (if you input compressed audio formats such as MP3 and WMA) or stem.MP4.

LALAL.AI supports all popular audio formats, lossy and lossless alike. As for the output formats, what you give is what you get — when you upload an audio file in FLAC, you receive separated stems in FLAC; when you upload a song in WAV, you get its stems in WAV, and so on.

Stems Separation Options

PhonicMind splits songs into 4 tracks — vocals, drums, bass, and other instruments/sounds. The volume of each stem can be adjusted after splitting. LALAL.AI separates songs into 8 stems – vocals, instrumental, drums, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, piano, and synthesizer.

Both services use artificial intelligence for music source separation. LALAL.AI has two record-breaking neural networks, Cassiopeia and Phoenix, you can select between them before uploading a file. PhonicMind has one neural network and not much is known about it.

Splitting Quality Comparison

One video demonstrating the stem separation results of both services is worth a thousand words. Check out how LALAL.AI and PhonicMind extracted vocal and instrumental stems out of the same song: