How-to guide
How to separate drums from a CD rip
CD rips at 16-bit/44.1 kHz are perfect source material for drum separation — lossless, DRM-free, and widely available. DrumSplit handles WAV and FLAC rips natively and produces studio-quality separated stems.
Rip your CDs as WAV or FLAC (not MP3) for the best separation quality. Tools like Exact Audio Copy (Windows) or XLD (Mac) produce bit-perfect rips.
Step-by-step
- Rip the CD to WAV or FLAC. Use Exact Audio Copy, XLD, dBpoweramp or fre:ac to rip tracks as lossless WAV or FLAC.
- Upload to DrumSplit.io. Drop the ripped file onto DrumSplit. Both WAV and FLAC are accepted natively.
- Pick your mode. Natural for most CD content (rock, pop, jazz, classical). Puncher for electronic music.
- Wait 2-3 minutes. CD-quality audio processes cleanly. Results are as good as DrumSplit can produce.
- Download your stems. 6 lossless WAV files. The highest quality drum separation you can get from a consumer release.
Tips for better results
- CD quality (16-bit/44.1 kHz) is the sweet spot for drum separation — no benefit from upsampling to 96 kHz.
- For a whole album, batch-process by uploading 10 tracks at once.
- Old CDs from the 1960s-80s often have very clean, simple drum mixes that separate beautifully.
Try DrumSplit
Upload a song and get 5 individual drum stems plus a drumless music track. From $0.99 per split. No subscription. Credits never expire.
Try DrumSplit