By: James Vance – SeaPRwire – Cloud round-trips still kill the moment for anyone who needs clean stems right now. A guitarist mid-jam cannot wait for a server response. A dubbing house under NDA cannot risk sending finished mixes offsite. That friction is the exact problem LALAL.AI just put on the floor at IBC2026.
The company is running its stem-separation engine fully offline inside Neko, a compact wireless AI mini studio from Neko Engineering. Visitors at Stand 14.C45 in Hall 14 can watch a track split live into vocals, drums, bass and guitar with no internet connection and no per-inference fee. Nik Pogorsky, co-founder of LALAL.AI, called it a different kind of product decision after six years of browser-based tools. Vadim Smirnov, CEO of Neko Engineering, said the engine held up in real time on-device hardware without cutting corners on quality. Alongside the hardware demo, LALAL.AI is showing practical post-production cases drawn from broadcast and localization work. Field recordings with wind and traffic noise become clean dialogue in minutes. Finished mixes without delivered M&E tracks yield isolated dialogue so a new-language dub can sit on the original background. Stadium music beds that trigger Content ID blocks can be removed while commentary and ambience stay intact. Final mixes without multitracks can still give up vocal and instrumental stems. Room reverberation from untreated spaces such as conference halls can be stripped. Studios that need strict data security can run the same technology on-premises through the Lyra-powered VST3 and AU plugin inside Ableton Live, Reaper, DaVinci Resolve Fairlight and Adobe Premiere Pro. Anastasia Shikina, business development manager, will be on the stand and framed both the Neko integration and the workflow demos as the same story: usable, controllable audio from material that never arrived clean.
The commercial loop is already visible. LALAL.AI’s Voice Cleaner, Stem Splitter, Voice Cloner and VST tools remain available at lalal.ai. The Neko device with the built-in stem splitter is open for pre-order at 349 dollars, down from a 499-dollar retail price, with shipping set for 2027. Nearly seven million professionals already trust the platform. Moving the same engine into a pocket-sized offline device removes the last remaining excuse for cloud dependency in both creative and security-sensitive environments. For any post house or musician still routing stems through a browser tab, the practical next step is simple: book a slot at the stand, test the live split yourself, and decide whether the cloud tax is still worth paying.
Author bio: James Vance, long-time senior commentator for international technology weeklies covering audio production, hardware integration and broadcast workflows.