Every house and techno producer has done it: loop a bar of an old record, isolate the bassline by ear with EQ cuts and a lot of patience, and hope it's clean enough to flip. Universal Audio just made that a right-click.
LUNA 3.0, released September 15, folds AI stem separation and audio-to-MIDI conversion straight into the DAW's free tier, no external tools, no bouncing to a web service and back. The separation and transcription engine underneath comes from Moises, the same audio-AI outfit that has been quietly powering stem tools across the industry, licensed and built into LUNA's own workflow rather than bolted on.
What can producers actually do with this?
The free version, LUNA Free, splits any stereo mix into four stems, drums, bass, vocals, other, right inside the timeline, alongside a scale-aware piano roll, folder tracks and chord/key rulers that were already useful for anyone building a track around a sampled loop. Pay $199 for LUNA Studio (or subscribe to UAD's Spark Studio at $19.99 a month) and the split goes to six stems, plus audio-to-MIDI conversion that turns an isolated bassline or drum stem into an editable MIDI part you can reassign to a synth or drum machine.
For house and techno work specifically, that audio-to-MIDI step is the interesting one. Sampling has always meant living with the original performance, its timing, its pitch, its exact groove. Turning a stem into MIDI means a producer can take the skeleton of a bassline from a reference track and rebuild it on their own sound, which is a fundamentally different (and legally murkier) kind of flip than a straight loop chop.
Why the vocal tools matter beyond pop sessions
LUNA Studio also adds vocal transcription with a time-aligned lyric browser and chord extraction, features clearly built for singer-songwriter sessions but just as usable for a producer pulling an a cappella out of an old disco or soul record for a vocal house edit. Add Celemony's Tonalic Essential and Dreamtonics' Synthesizer V 2 Core, both included in Studio, and the update leans hard into treating the human voice as a malleable, editable source rather than a fixed recording.
"Great songs start with ideas," said UA CEO Bill Putnam Jr., framing the update around capturing and following creative momentum rather than fighting the software.
Does this replace dedicated stem-splitting tools?
Not for everyone, but it removes a step that used to break flow: exporting a reference track to a separate app, waiting on a render, then re-importing stems into the session. Producers who already lean on tools like LALAL.AI or iZotope RX for isolation now have a native option that lives inside the same timeline as the rest of the arrangement, which matters more for a fast-moving club-track session than the raw separation quality does.
LUNA 3.0 is a free update for existing LUNA users; new installs and the Studio tier upgrade are available now on Universal Audio's site.
