Press kit.

Short

Grit is a live stem performance instrument for Mac, Windows and Linux. It separates tracks into drums, bass, vocals and other parts on the computer itself and lays them out across up to eight decks, where every detected section becomes a pad that launches on the beat.

Long

Grit is a live stem performance instrument for Mac, Windows and Linux, developed by Screen Island GmbH in Wetzlar, Germany. Where most DJ software plays one track after another, Grit plays them against each other: the drums from one song, the bassline from another, a vocal from a third. Grit detects tempo, beat grid, key and phrase-aligned sections in imported music and separates each track into four stems locally on the graphics chip, with Apple’s MLX on Metal on the Mac and Vulkan on Windows and Linux, with no uploads and no cloud service. Up to eight decks turn sections into pads that launch on the next beat, bar or phrase, with stem switching, Key Sync, scenes, a three-band mixer and filter, headphone cueing, keyboard scratching, MIDI Learn and a ready-made Akai APC40 MK1 preset. Grit is written in Rust around a hard real-time audio engine and runs without an account or subscription. It is in private beta for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 14 or later, with test builds for Windows and Linux on 64-bit Intel and AMD computers.

• Four or eight decks side by side, each detected section a pad
• Four-stem separation (drums, bass, vocals, other) on your own computer: MLX on Metal on the Mac, Vulkan on Windows and Linux
• Full, Acapella and Instrumental with one key, or each stem on its own
• Launch quantize: Free, 1 beat, 1 bar, 4 bars or 8 bars
• Key Sync to a master key, pitch lock and tap tempo
• Scenes that recall tempo, playing sections, stems and the mix of every deck
• Three-band EQ with full kill, low- and high-pass filter, per-deck crossfader assignment and Roll
• Headphone cue with separate master and cue outputs
• Eight tempo-synced keyboard scratch patterns
• MIDI Learn for any controller and a built-in Akai APC40 MK1 preset
• Native Rust application with a real-time audio engine; plays offline, no license keys

A simplified browser sketch of the idea is on the playground; the full list is in the support guide.