SAM Audio
Promptable audio separation for speech, music, and sound effects.
SAM Audio is a powerful open-source tool for prompt-based audio separation, combining text, visual, and time prompting in a unified model. It's a significant step forward for research and prototyping, but lacks API support and commercial licensing clarity.
- Audio engineers
- Video editors
- Multimedia researchers
- Content creators
- Users needing real-time streaming separation
- Those requiring commercial licenses without review
- Enterprise-ready API support
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In short
SAM Audio — Promptable audio separation for speech, music, and sound effects. Best for Audio engineers, Video editors, Multimedia researchers. Free to use.
Viability Score
How likely is SAM Audio to still be operational in 12 months? Based on 4 signals — momentum (how recently it shipped), wrapper dependency, revenue model, and web presence.
Last calculated: July 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Text-prompted audio separation
- Visual-click separation from video
- Time-span based audio isolation
- Unified model for speech, music, sound effects
- Single-channel audio input
- Multi-domain separation without retraining
- Open-source model weights
- Inference GitHub repository
- Hugging Face model card
- Supports natural language prompts
- Spatial audio separation capability
- Real-time processing (inference under 1s for short clips)
- Zero-shot generalization to unseen sounds
- Promptable interface for granular control
About SAM Audio
SAM Audio is a unified model that separates any sound from any source using natural language, visual clicks on video, or time spans. It supports text prompts (e.g., "dog barking"), visual segmentation in videos, and temporal boundaries to isolate specific audio components. This model unifies speech, music, and sound effect separation into one promptable framework. It's designed for audio engineers, video editors, researchers, and content creators who need precise audio source isolation without complex setups. The model uses a novel promptable architecture that allows flexible and intuitive control over the separation process, making it accessible to non-experts while retaining advanced capabilities.
Behind the Verdict
SAM Audio is an impressive research contribution that pushes the boundaries of audio source separation. Its ability to use natural language, video clicks, and time spans as prompts makes it incredibly flexible. However, it is not yet a polished product. The lack of an API, commercial licensing, and real-time support limits its immediate use in production environments. For researchers and tinkerers, it's a fantastic toy. For professionals needing reliable, latency-sensitive separation, alternatives like Open-Unmix or Spleeter may be more appropriate today. That said, the model's architecture hints at a future where audio editing becomes as intuitive as typing or pointing.
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Use Cases
- Isolate a specific conversation from a crowded restaurant recording using a text prompt.
- Separate a guitar track from a song by clicking on the guitar in a video.
- Extract a dog barking sound effect from a street recording with time-span selection.
- Remove background noise from a podcast by describing the desired speech prompt.
- Clean up audio for video editing by visually clicking on unwanted sounds.
- Analyze wildlife recordings by prompting for bird calls.
Models Under the Hood
Limitations
- SAM Audio is a research model with no official API or commercial support.
- It requires significant computational resources for inference (GPU recommended).
- The model currently only accepts single-channel audio and may struggle with highly overlapping sources.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
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