Acon Digital's Remix:Drums separates a drum track into six stems in real time for $49. It's a good plugin, so the honest question is what the extra money buys you. Here's the answer.
Both plugins split a mixed drum recording into stems while the track plays and give each stem a fader. Both run locally on macOS and Windows. If your whole job is turning a drum loop up or down one drum at a time, either tool works, and Remix:Drums costs less.
| ReStem 2 Pro | Remix:Drums | |
|---|---|---|
| Drum stems | Kick, snare, hi-hat, toms, ride, crash + Other | Kick, snare, hi-hat, toms, cymbals, other |
| Ride and crash on separate stems | ✓ | One cymbals stem |
| Live separation on the insert | ✓ | ✓ |
| Offline modes for higher final quality | ✓ Better and Best | — |
| Per-stem gate & transient shaping | ✓ | — |
| Drum replacement built in | ✓ Drumagog, kick & snare | — |
| MIDI from the performance | ✓ every stem, live or exported | — |
| ARA2 timeline processing | ✓ | — |
| Standalone app | ✓ | — |
| Price | $199 one-time ($99 Core) | $49 one-time |
Details checked August 2026. Versions and prices change, so please verify before you decide.
Remix:Drums gives you stems, levels, sensitivity controls, and multi-output routing. That's the whole list, and for $49 it's honest value. But separation is usually the first step of a drum mix, not the last: the snare still needs its bleed gated, and a weak kick is still weak on its own fader.
ReStem puts a channel strip behind every stem: a look-ahead gate, a transient shaper, and on the kick and snare the Transient Restorer and the Drumagog replacement engine. Every stem can also send MIDI through TrigNet, so the performance can drive any drum instrument you own, live or as an exported file.
Live separation always trades some quality for speed. That's why ReStem also has the Better and Best offline modes, which render cleaner than any live split, with Best built for messy, bleed-heavy recordings. Remix:Drums has no offline mode, so there's no higher-quality pass to fall back on before you print. ReStem's renders are also repeatable: the same file gives the same stems every time.
Remix:Drums puts the ride and the crashes on one cymbals stem. ReStem keeps them apart, so you can push the ride and tame the crashes independently. Its Other stem also catches everything that isn't a drum, so guitars or vocals that bled into the take land on their own fader.
If you need occasional level tweaks on drum loops, buy Remix:Drums and enjoy it. If drums are central to your work, the offline modes, the effects rack, replacement, MIDI, and ARA2 are on the other side of the price gap. The free trial is the quickest way to hear whether they matter on your material.
The engines are built differently: Remix:Drums separates in real time only, while ReStem's Better and Best modes let the engine take as long as the recording needs — headroom Remix:Drums has no counterpart to. Live against live there's a structural difference too: ReStem keeps the ride and the crashes on separate stems, where Remix:Drums folds them into one. The rest is better judged with ears than adjectives: solo the snare in each, listen to a cymbal decay, and the same drum loop through both will tell you more than we can.
Yes. The live mode runs about a third of a second behind the track, with your DAW compensating automatically. Better and Best take longer and come out cleaner, which is why we suggest rendering before you print a final mix.
In Pro Tools, each stem feeds its own output bus. In any other DAW you drag the rendered stems onto their own tracks, or use ARA2 to process right on the timeline.
The separation doesn't need them; the engine decides what belongs to each drum. Fine control lives in the per-stem tools instead, like the gate threshold and the MIDI sensitivity.
Seven days, the full Pro feature set, your own sessions. Compare it against anything.