What does PEEL STEMS 2 actually do?
You drop zplane's plugin on a channel carrying a finished stereo mix, and it hands you four faders: Drums, Bass, Vocals and Other. Move them and the track comes apart in real time, no offline render, no bounce, no waiting for a progress bar. Mute the vocal to build an instant instrumental, solo the drums to steal a groove, pull the bass out to fold in your own low end. It behaves like any other insert, so the separation lives inside the arrangement instead of in a separate export folder.
Why does keeping it local matter?
The headline is not just speed, it is where the audio goes, which is nowhere. Every calculation runs on your own machine, and zplane is explicit that nothing is uploaded to a server. That is the opposite of the cloud stem tools that ask you to send a track away and wait for it to come back, and it means PEEL STEMS keeps working on a plane, in a basement club with no signal, or on a session you would rather not hand to anyone else.
What changed in version 2?
The separation engine is new, and the number that matters is latency: at 44.1 kHz it falls from 483 ms in version 1 to 245 ms, which zplane calls a 49 percent cut, with around 385 ms on Intel Macs. The interface has been redesigned with colour-coded stems and a wider isolation slider, and the Focus EQ now prints its cutoff frequencies so you can carve a specific band by eye. It is 59 euros, 19 to upgrade from version 1, with a free demo, and it loads as VST3, AU and AAX in every major DAW on Windows 10 and 11 or macOS 13 and later.
Real-time stem separation used to be a party trick. At 245 ms and fully offline, it is turning into plumbing.
