Timbrel

Turn any song into your backing band.

Timbrel is a free, open-source desktop studio that splits music into six stems — vocals, drums, bass, guitar, piano & other — then hands you the mixing desk: mute your part and play it yourself, loop the hard bars, bend tempo and key, and follow synced lyrics. Fully local: no cloud, no account, nothing leaves your device.

Website: timbrel.samz.in · License: MIT

What it does

• Six stems from any song — Demucs (htdemucs_6s) runs on your own GPU or Apple Silicon; a typical song separates in about 30 seconds, with BPM and key detected on the way.
• Search YouTube, or drop a file — one omnibox: find any song via yt-dlp, or drag in your own mp3 / wav / flac / m4a.
• Practice tools — per-stem mute/solo/volume, loop regions, real-time tempo and key (semitone) shifting, metronome click and count-in.
• Synced lyrics — fetched automatically from LRCLIB, scrolling with the playhead.
• Multi-device output routing — send any stem (or the click) to any output device: click to the drummer's in-ears, vocals to the singer's headphones, the rest to the PA.
• WiZ concert lights — discover Philips/Connected by WiZ bulbs on your LAN and drive their color and brightness from the live post-fader mix, with coordinated multi-bulb effects.
• Playlists & export — group songs into setlists; export stems, mixdowns, minus-one versions or click tracks, all FLAC.

Your library lives in plain files on disk — FLAC stems and a local SQLite database. Only YouTube search and lyrics need the internet; WiZ sync stays on your LAN and everything else works offline.

Install

Grab an installer from the releases page — macOS (Apple Silicon), Windows and Linux. Builds are unsigned for now: on macOS run xattr -cr /Applications/Timbrel.app once after installing. On first run the app downloads its separation engine (~1 GB, one time). See RELEASING.md for how releases are cut.

Build from source

Prerequisites: Node 22+, pnpm 9, Python 3.11 (3.13 won't work — Demucs' dependencies lack wheels), and ffmpeg on PATH for compressed inputs.

git clone https://github.com/SammitBadodekar/timbrel
cd timbrel && pnpm install

# one-time: the Python separation engine
cd sidecar
python3.11 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cd ..

# run the desktop app
pnpm --filter desktop dev

The Electron app auto-detects sidecar/.venv in dev. See sidecar/README.md for the stdio protocol and engine details.

WiZ concert lights

The computer and bulbs must be on the same local network. In the WiZ app, enable Settings → Security → Allow local communication. Choose Lights from the library or studio, discover and select the bulbs once, then arm concert sync. The saved global rig follows every song and waits in dim standby between tracks. Timbrel uses WiZ's local UDP protocol on port 38899; it does not use the WiZ cloud. Stopping the show restores the state captured when each bulb was discovered.

How it's put together

Path	What it is
apps/desktop	The app — Electron + React + Tailwind, Zustand stores, Web Audio engine
apps/web	timbrel.samz.in — Astro single page, deployed on Cloudflare Workers
sidecar	Python separation engine — Demucs + librosa, spoken to over line-delimited JSON
packages/core	Shared TypeScript types (incl. the sidecar protocol)
packages/ui	Shared UI utilities

Standing on excellent open-source shoulders: Demucs, yt-dlp, LRCLIB, SoundTouch, Electron.

License

MIT © Sammit Badodekar