Steinberg's SpectraLayers is one of the very few tools besides ReStem that can take a drum kit apart into individual drums. It works in a completely different way, though, so the right choice depends on how you like to work.
SpectraLayers is a spectral editor. It shows audio as a picture of frequencies over time, and you edit that picture the way you would edit a photo. Unmixing is one of many things it does, alongside repair and restoration, and its drum unmix can pull a kit apart into kick, snare, hi-hat, tom, ride, and crash layers inside the editor.
ReStem 2 lives in your session instead. It separates the kit onto seven faders, live or offline, and puts a drum mixer's tools behind each one: gate, transient shaper, Drumagog replacement on kick and snare, and MIDI from every stem. The separation is the start of the workflow, not the end of it.
| ReStem 2 Pro | SpectraLayers Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Drum separation plugin & standalone app | Spectral editor for repair and unmixing |
| Drum stems | Kick, snare, hi-hat, toms, ride, crash + Other | Kick, snare, hi-hat, toms, ride, crash |
| Live separation while the track plays | ✓ | Offline only |
| Runs as a plugin on the insert | ✓ | Editor + ARA |
| ARA2 | ✓ | ✓ |
| Per-stem gate & transient shaping | ✓ | — |
| Drum replacement built in | ✓ Drumagog, kick & snare | — |
| MIDI from the performance | ✓ every stem, live or exported | — |
| Spectral painting & repair tools | — | ✓ |
| Price | $199 one-time ($99 Core) | Around $360 one-time |
Details checked August 2026. Versions and prices change, so please verify before you decide.
If you do restoration or post-production, SpectraLayers is remarkable. You can see a cough inside a violin note and erase it. It unmixes whole songs, handles dialogue cleanup, and integrates deeply with Cubase and Nuendo. For surgical spectral editing, nothing in ReStem competes, because ReStem doesn't try to.
ReStem only does drums. Separation runs live on the insert with 360 ms of latency, and the offline modes render higher-quality, repeatable stems. Because the plugin knows each stem is a drum, it can gate the bleed, restore a rounded-off attack, swap the snare for a sample, or turn the performance into MIDI with tom pitches and hi-hat articulations already sorted.
Get SpectraLayers if you repair audio for a living and drum unmixing is one job among many. Get ReStem 2 if drums are the point: mixing them, cleaning them up, replacing hits, or turning them into MIDI. Plenty of studios have room for both.
Yes. Its drum unmix produces kick, snare, hi-hat, tom, ride, and crash layers, and reviewers rate it well. The difference is what happens next: SpectraLayers gives you layers in a spectral display, ReStem gives you faders with gating, shaping, replacement, and MIDI ready to go.
We're the wrong people to ask — of course we think ours sounds better. For what it's worth, it's the comparison we hear about most, and people who have run the same drum track through both often tell us they prefer ReStem's stems. There's an obvious selection effect in who writes to a drum-plugin company, so treat that as a hint, not a verdict. The structural difference is real, though: drum separation is ReStem's entire job, while SpectraLayers spreads its attention across repair, restoration, and unmixing. The free trial runs the full engine, so the same file through both settles it in ten minutes.
Not necessarily. ReStem 2 runs in Cubase as a VST3 with full ARA2 support. SpectraLayers is excellent there for repair work, but its drum workflow still happens in its editor rather than on channel strips.
Seven days, the full Pro feature set, your own sessions. Hear the split before you spend anything.