[thisiswater]

Tried splitting a complex arrangement (Chicago by Sufjan Stevens). Drums bass and vocals come out fairly well, though the drums stem seems to lack other percussion elements outside of the core rock drumkit (e.g. tamborine), and cymbals hits are clipped rather than ringing. The 'other' stem, the rest of the instrumentation, keeps a fair bit of the percussion and there's bleed from the vocal melody.

The backing vocals seem to have disappeared for the most part, and are only audible in the vocals stem when the lead vocal is present (like they're reverse-ducked? Been a while since I did any production, the terms have escaped me...).

Not much use with complex arrangements to be honest, I was hoping to get things like the strings section separated from the rest of the arrangement.

Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWX3El-slpY

Output: https://file.io/etpOQt57ziKe

[pcf]

Did you use a FLAC/WAV file? That should yield the best results.

(Only asking because you linked to YouTube, and I'm not sure if you used the YouTube audio for your source.)

[thisiswater]

Perhaps you're right, I'd have to check.

I typed the song in the search and pressed the first likely result, which is the youtube video I linked. Using the software as intended I believe.

[marssaxman]

YouTube audio is optimized for bit rate, not quality (128K MP3). You will get better results with a higher-bitrate MP3 (320K would be good), better still with an uncompressed format like FLAC or WAV.

[BitPirate]

Makes sense. MP3 tries to compress without loosing information in the hearable spectrum of a human but that information can still be processed by algorithms.

[NonNefarious]

I can't find any way to do this.