Splice Launches Create, a Free AI DAW With Voice Control and Pay-at-Export Samples

TL;DR

Splice, whose sample library turns up in hits by Sabrina Carpenter and Kendrick Lamar, shipped Splice Create on November 5: a free Mac DAW, now in beta, with an AI agent named Rheo that you steer by voice or text. Sounds from the three-million-strong catalog drop into projects as free MP3 previews and only get licensed at export, AI Variations of a sample pay that sample's creator when licensed, and agent actions are metered at $10 per 1,000 Rheo units. Exporting songs takes a Create Pro subscription at $9.99 a month.

What shipped

Create is a full DAW. If you remember Create as Splice's mobile sample matchmaker, this is a different animal: a Mac studio app with a timeline, mixer, piano roll, sequencer and device chain, hosting for third-party VSTs, and five bundled instruments: the Sampler, Drum Rack, Splice INSTRUMENT, a new two-oscillator subtractive Synth, and the Astra hybrid with virtual analogue, wavetable, granular, FM and sample-based engines. Create ships with 38 stock effects and utilities. Windows and web versions are promised but not here yet.

The catalog is the point. Drop an empty clip on an audio track and a search bar into the library appears: type female R&B vocal and Create picks a sample for you, loads it on the timeline, and transposes and time-stretches it to your project's key and tempo. Similarity search finds near-neighbors, including for sounds that never came from Splice. Skepta supplies the launch quote, crediting a Splice break beat with reviving a track he had been messing with for years.

Rheo, the agent at the fader

The assistant has two modes. Point shows you how, walking the interface with a glowing cursor while it explains each step. Assist does the job for you. Point is a driving instructor with a laser pointer; Assist is a chauffeur.

In Assist mode Rheo searches sounds, writes melodies and chord progressions as MIDI, designs synth patches, builds arrangements, analyzes audio, and chains multi-stage tasks that take minutes by hand into a few seconds, all from conversational text or voice. MusicRadar asked it to slice a vocal loop into sixteenth notes and reverse every other chop; it got it right on the first attempt, a modest triumph for agents and a deflating one for anyone who spent a year learning that exact move.

Ask for a whole song and it complies, picking samples and writing parts on the stock instruments. There is no text-to-audio generation in Create: it sequences existing, licensed sounds instead of synthesizing waveforms, apart from the Variations feature below. Two fences: Rheo cannot touch third-party plugins, and it will not replicate commercial songs, though it will assemble Splice samples to imitate a named artist's style, which MusicRadar calls potentially problematic.

Licensing is the actual product

Drag any sample into a project and it lands as an MP3 preview, with no license taken and no Splice credit spent. You can build a finished arrangement entirely on previews; at export, every sound you never licensed bounces as silence. The catalog turns into raw material with a toll booth at the city limits, and the toll only applies to what survived your final edit.

Variations is the generative half. An in-house model trained on Splice's catalog generates a new sound that sits near an existing sample without copying it; the Variation carries the original's license, and when you license one, the original sample's creator gets paid. Licensed AI generation with money flowing upstream to the humans whose work shaped the output is rare enough to be news, and it arrives while Suno is still fighting the majors in court.

Splice told MusicRadar that Rheo mixes in-house models with third-party ones, including "classic LLMs" that translate intent into actions, and that all of it was trained on fully licensed data. What fully licensed covers for a general-purpose LLM is an open question MusicRadar leaves hanging.

Every DAW is getting an agent

Create lands in the middle of a wave. Image-Line shipped its Gopher chatbot in FL Studio, Logic Pro 13 arrives later this month with an assistant that can drive the DAW, hobbyists have wired Ableton Live to frontier models over MCP servers, and agentic assistants are spreading through Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve. MusicRadar's verdict after hands-on time: Rheo's control goes deeper than anything in another DAW today. The moat is the catalog. A generic model wired to a DAW can move faders; Rheo can pull from three million licensed sounds and license them on the way out.

The catch

MusicRadar's review ends uneasy. Handing patch design, melody writing and sample digging to an agent saves minutes and hands off the exact work where a producer develops a taste. CEO Kakul Srivastava insists most tools either make the song for you or assume you already know everything, and that Create sits between those poles; the same review watched Rheo produce a full song on request anyway. The sharpest line came from a commenter on MusicRadar's Instagram: "why even make music when music can be made for you?"

Ownership is settled, at least: ProSoundWeb reports creators keep ownership of what they make, and licensed Splice sounds stay royalty-free.

Key Takeaways

• Splice Create is a free Mac DAW in beta: timeline, mixer, five instruments, 38 effects, VST hosting, and the three-million-sound catalog searchable from inside clips. Windows and web are coming.
• Rheo, the built-in agent, drives the DAW by voice or text in two modes: Point teaches with a glowing cursor, Assist executes. It writes MIDI, designs patches and builds arrangements, and cannot reach third-party plugins.
• Sampling is free until export: unlicensed sounds play as MP3 previews and bounce as silence in the final render, so you license only what survived the arrangement.
• Variations generates near-alternatives of catalog sounds under the original's license and pays the original creator when one is licensed, a working template for licensed AI music generation.
• Pricing: $0 to start, Create Pro at $9.99 a month to export, Rheo units at $10 per 1,000 with 100 free units up front.
• The agentic DAW wave is here: FL Studio's Gopher, Logic Pro 13's assistant, MCP rigs on Live. Splice's edge is an agent commanding a licensed catalog.

Sources: Splice announcement, Splice Create product page, MusicRadar hands-on, ProSoundWeb