This year my son and I started learning the drums together. The most fun way to get better — and the one that actually stuck — was to pick a song we love and play along. But playing along to a finished recording is harder than it sounds: the drummer is buried in the mix, so you can't quite hear what they're doing, and once you can play the part, their drums fight with yours.
What we really wanted was two versions of every song — drums only, to hear exactly what was played, and the song with the drums removed, to play over. So Claude and I built it.
What it is
SongCoach is a small macOS app for drummers, and the first release is now up on the downloads page.
You play any song through your Mac — a YouTube tab, Spotify, Apple Music, a local file — and SongCoach captures the audio and splits it into three stems: the full song, drums only, and the song without drums. Then it opens a player with three synced waveforms, solo switching, an A–B loop you set by dragging on the waveform, and a pitch-preserved slow-down, so you can drill four bars until they're yours.
The bits I found interesting
- The separation is an AI model running on your own machine. SongCoach uses Demucs to pull the drums out — bundled and run in-process, so there's nothing to install and no server call. This was my first time embedding an ML model directly inside a shipping app, which was half the reason I wanted to build it.
- It records your system audio, so it works with anything. A tiny Swift helper taps the Mac's audio output with ScreenCaptureKit — no BlackHole or virtual audio device to set up. If your Mac can play it, SongCoach can capture it.
- Everything stays on your machine. No account, no cloud, nothing uploaded. Your recordings and stems live in a folder on disk, and the little database is just a disposable index rebuilt from those files — delete it, or move the folder to another Mac, and it still works.
- It's a real desktop app. Python, ffmpeg, the native capture helper, and the
AI model are all frozen into one signed, notarized
.app— no right-click "Open" dance, nothing else to install. Packaging a desktop app end to end was something I hadn't done in a long time, and getting it down to a drag-to-Applications DMG was oddly satisfying.
Getting it
It's macOS 13+ on Apple Silicon for now. Grab the SongCoach.dmg from the
releases page, drag it into
Applications, and grant the screen & system-audio recording permission on
first capture. That's it.
It's also completely free and open source — MIT-licensed, with the whole thing up on GitHub. Poke around, build it yourself, or open an issue.
It's early — a v1 with rough edges — but it's already changed how we practise. If you drum, I'd love to know what songs you take apart with it.