Yurka: Backing Tracks & Stems

Take a song apart and learn it.

Open a file you already have, and Yurka splits it into six tracks right on your phone — voice, drums, bass, guitar, keys and everything else. Mute the singer and take the lead yourself. Turn the guitar down and play that part. Slow the tempo, drop the key to fit your voice, and loop the two bars that keep tripping you up.

HOW IT WORKS

1. Bring a song — from Files, Photos, your music library, or record something right now.
2. Wait for the tracks — usually under a minute on a recent iPhone.
3. Everything else — the words, the chords — arrives a moment later.

WHAT YOU GET

• Six separate tracks from any recording, with a fader for each
• Tempo without the chipmunk effect, key in semitones
• Hold and drag to loop a section; it repeats with a lap counter
• Chords along the song
• The words move with the music, one at a time
• Sing along with the microphone, record a take, listen back, share it with the music
• The same app on iPhone and iPad, with a wide layout on the big screens

EVERYTHING HAPPENS ON YOUR DEVICE

There is no upload and no queue: your song is separated by your own phone, and neither the audio nor your own takes ever leave the device. The app goes online only to look up words and to fetch the recognition model.

Six tracks usually take under a minute on a recent iPhone, and a couple of minutes at most on the oldest supported devices. There is no account and no sign-in, and everything except looking up words works in airplane mode.

WHERE THE WORDS COME FROM

Yurka is not a music catalog: it does not stream, download or sell songs, and it works only with files you already have. The words are worked out in several steps. If the file carries them in its own tags, those are used. If not, the app listens to the vocal track it has just separated, on the device, and looks the song up along the way, including an open community-maintained database. Anything it cannot confirm is shown as a draft, and you can always paste your own text instead.

REQUIREMENTS

iOS 26 or later. Recordings up to 10 minutes. Audio and video files: MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, OPUS, CAF, MP4, MOV, M4V.