iZotope RX: Which Edition Has Music Rebalance?
Not the cheap one. RX 12 Elements is 109 euros and does not separate stems. Music Rebalance starts at 439 euros, and a separate tool undercuts it.
No affiliate links on this page, and nothing here earns us anything. Prices were checked on 8 November 2026 against the sources listed at the end. How we know this.
People buy RX for one of two reasons. Either they want to clean up a noisy recording, or they have heard it can pull a vocal out of a finished mix. Those two needs sit on opposite sides of a €330 price step, and the product names do not tell you where the line is.
The feature that splits a mix is called Music Rebalance. It is not in the cheap edition.
The short version
- RX 12 Elements is €109 and does not list Music Rebalance among its features.
- Music Rebalance appears at Standard, €439. That is the real entry price for stem separation in RX.
- Advanced is €1,499 and is aimed at post production, not music.
- Photon, a separate iZotope tool, was €284.25 on sale and does stem separation on its own, locally.
- So the cheapest iZotope route to stem separation is not RX at all.
The ladder, and where stems appear on it
iZotope prices, and which of them separates a mix into stems
RX 12 Elements, €109. iZotope summarises it as six plugins and lists the key features as Repair Assistant, Voice De-noise, De-click and Adaptive or Static De-hum. The body copy adds De-reverb and De-clip. Music Rebalance is not mentioned anywhere in its own feature descriptions.
RX 12 Standard, €439. Here the product copy says you can “Visually split your audio into stems with Stems View (via Scene Rebalance, Music Rebalance, or Dialogue Isolate), then apply any RX tool exactly where you need it.”
RX 12 Advanced, €1,499. Key features are listed as Dialogue Isolate, Ambience Match, Spectral Repair, stem separation and advanced noise reduction, and iZotope files it under audio post production rather than music.
The thing that makes the ladder look silly
iZotope also sells Photon, which was €284.25 when we looked, reduced from €379. It is a standalone app and an ARA2 plugin, and it exists to do exactly the job that sends people to RX in the first place: “splits mixes into stems and cleans noisy audio”.
It ships 12 machine learning models, can split up to six voices apart, and iZotope’s own summary says it “Runs locally on your GPU. No uploads, no cutoffs, no interruptions.”
So if stem separation is what you want, the cheapest iZotope product that does it is not an RX edition. Photon at €284.25 undercuts RX Standard by about €155, and the gap against Advanced is over €1,200.
That local-processing claim matters beyond price. Most of the convenient stem separators upload your audio to someone else’s server, which is a problem if the material is not yours to share. We went through which tools avoid that in Which AI Audio Tools Run Offline.
Before you spend anything
The uncomfortable comparison is with free software. Demucs publishes 9.00 dB SDR on the MUSDB HQ test set for its fine-tuned v4 model, which is the highest published separation figure among the tools we looked at, and it costs nothing. We set that out with the hardware requirements in AI Stem Separation Pricing.
We have not compared Photon’s output quality against Demucs, and we are not going to guess. iZotope publishes no SDR figure we could find. What we can say is that the paid products buy you a graphical interface, an ARA2 plugin that sits in your DAW, and no command line, and that those are the things you are actually paying for rather than measured superiority.
What €1,060 more actually buys
The jump from Standard at €439 to Advanced at €1,499 is the biggest number in this comparison, so it is worth knowing exactly what crosses that line.
Reading iZotope’s own edition comparison, Advanced adds four things that Standard does not have:
| Advanced only | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Scene Rebalance | Separating dialogue, music and effects in a finished scene |
| Ambience Match | Matching room tone across edits |
| De-rustle | Removing clothing noise from lavalier mics |
| Trim Silence | Bulk-trimming silence from long recordings |
Every one of those is a film and television post-production tool. None of them touches music. If you are mastering tracks or pulling stems out of a mix, the €1,060 between Standard and Advanced buys you nothing you will open.
The same table settles the Elements question from the other direction. Elements carries seven modules: Repair Assistant, Voice De-noise, De-click, De-clip, De-hum, De-reverb and the improved Repair Assistant neural nets. Stems View, Music Rebalance and Dialogue Isolate all appear first at Standard.
One caveat on price rather than features. The €284.25 we quote for Photon was a sale price, and sales end. The regular price on the same page was €379, and that is the number to plan around.
What we would do
Do not buy RX Elements for stem separation. At €109 it is a reasonable noise repair toolkit and a poor stem separator, because it is not a stem separator at all.
If stem separation is the whole reason you are here, look at Photon before RX Standard. It is cheaper, it is built for the job, and it runs on your own machine.
If you need spectral repair and noise reduction as well, Standard at €439 is the edition where RX becomes the tool people describe, and the €330 over Elements buys a genuinely different program rather than a few extra presets.
And try Demucs first if you have a GPU and any tolerance for a command line. It is free, and on the one published measurement anyone has put a number to, it wins.
Questions people actually ask
Does RX Elements do stem separation?
No. iZotope lists RX 12 Elements' key features as Repair Assistant, Voice De-noise, De-click and Adaptive or Static De-hum, with De-reverb and De-clip described in the body copy. Music Rebalance is not among them. If you buy Elements at 109 euros expecting to split a mix into stems, you have bought the wrong thing.
What is the cheapest RX edition with Music Rebalance?
Standard, at 439 euros. Its product copy describes splitting audio into stems with Stems View via Scene Rebalance, Music Rebalance or Dialogue Isolate. That is a 330 euro step up from Elements.
Is there a cheaper iZotope option for stem separation?
Photon, at 284.25 euros on sale from 379 euros when we looked. It is a standalone app and ARA2 plugin built specifically for stem separation and noise removal, with 12 models, and iZotope states it runs locally on your GPU with no uploads.
What does RX Advanced add?
Four things Standard does not have: Scene Rebalance, Ambience Match, De-rustle and Trim Silence. All four are film and television post-production tools, so for music work the 1,060 euro gap between Standard and Advanced buys nothing you would open.
Sources
- iZotope, RX 12 Elements, read 8 November 2026
- iZotope, RX 12 Standard, read 8 November 2026
- iZotope, RX 12 Advanced, read 8 November 2026
- iZotope, Photon, read 8 November 2026