Splice is best known for its three-million strong sample library, a vast collection of sounds that have made their way into thousands of popular songs by everyone from Sabrina Carpenter to Kendrick Lamar.
In recent years, though, the company has grown into a multi-million-dollar music tech behemoth, diversifying into mobile music-making apps, virtual instruments and even soft synths. Today, Splice takes the next step in its evolution from sample platform and software marketplace to an end-to-end music creation ecosystem by releasing its very own DAW.
Launching in beta today for Mac users, Create is a fully-fledged digital audio workstation with all the functionality you’d expect (and some you probably wouldn’t), Splice’s sample library embedded directly into its workflow, and the most advanced AI-powered features we’ve seen in any DAW to date. It’s free to download, but exporting songs requires a Create Pro subscription, currently priced at $9.99/month.
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Create’s workflow will feel familiar to anyone that’s used a DAW before. You’ve got a central timeline that can be populated with five types of track, including the expected audio, instrument and return tracks, along with dedicated tracks for the native Sampler and Drum Rack plugins. Below that you’ll find the mixer, or the clip editor, piano roll, sequencer, or device chain for each track, depending on what’s selected.
Create can host third-party plugins, and it arrives with five instruments included: the aforementioned Sampler and Drum Rack are joined by Splice’s INSTRUMENT, a virtual instrument released last year, and two stock soft synths. Synth is a new two-oscillator subtractive affair, while Astra is a hybrid synth with virtual analogue, wavetable, granular, FM and sample-based engines that was already available through Splice’s Creator plan. There’s a collection of 38 stock audio effects and utilities onboard, too, covering all the usual bases.
On the left-hand side of the interface is a browser that provides direct access to Splice’s extensive library of samples. Several DAWs, like Live and Pro Tools, already have Splice integration built-in, but the integration in Create is much deeper. Create an empty clip in an audio track and Splice will show a search bar that’s linked directly to the sample platform. Type in what you’re after, (“female R&B vocal”, for example) and Splice will choose a sample for you and load it up on the timeline, transposed and time-stretched to match the key and tempo of your project.
Select the clip, and a list of alternative Splice samples that fit your brief will pop up next to the clip editor below. Here you can search by similarity for sounds in Splice’s library (this even works with non-Splice sounds) or create Variations. This is an AI-based feature Splice added to the Splice Sounds plugin back in April that generates unique alternatives to an existing sound that are close to, but not the same as the original. Using an in-house model trained on Splice’s catalogue, Variations are covered by the same license as the original sample, and the creator of that sample is compensated when a Variation is licensed.
What’s more, Create lets you drag any sample into your project without automatically licensing a sample or using a Splice credit. They land in your project as MP3 previews, allowing you to build a track in Create using as many unlicensed samples as you want – when your track is finished, you’ll need to license those samples before you can export the project, otherwise they bounce as silence.
For producers that rely on Splice samples in their music-making, having this kind of direct access to the platform embedded into the DAW could prove to be a significant upgrade to their workflow – especially if their current DAW doesn’t already have Splice integration. The ability to audition samples on the timeline in the context of a project without licensing them or spending any credits is useful too, and means you don’t have to spend a dime on a sound until you’re sure it’s the right one for your track. On the whole, though, none of this is particularly game-changing.
Create is a perfectly serviceable DAW, then, and though it doesn’t have the depth of Live or Logic Pro (and we wouldn’t expect it to on launch day) it’d be well-suited to anyone that already works with Splice’s existing tools. What really sets Create apart, though – for better or worse – is its AI chatbot, Rheo.
Like most chatbots, Rheo can offer guidance on how to use the DAW and give you advice on music-making more generally. Where it goes beyond anything we’ve seen in other DAWs, though, is its ability to control the software, taking actions inside the DAW in response to the user’s instructions, whether that’s through text commands in the chatbot interface or voice control. This kind of “agentic” AI – AI that can control computers, make decisions and complete tasks for you, rather than just generating text – poked its nose into the mainstream in 2026 with the release of tools like ChatGPT Work and Meta’s Muse.
It’s creeping into the music production world, too: Image-Line was an early adopter with its Gopher chatbot in FL Studio, and Apple has just added an AI assistant to Logic Pro 13, which will be released later this month. Some users have already been getting ahead of the game on this, connecting DAWs like Ableton Live to third-party AI models via MCP servers, and it’s fast reshaping the world of hardware, too, as AI-powered ‘vibe coding’ tools are being used to write custom firmware, gifting synths and grooveboxes with new off-label abilities.
The level of control that Rheo provides is much deeper than anything we’ve seen in another DAW, though. Rheo can search for sounds, generate melodies, design synth patches, create arrangements, analyse audio and execute multi-stage tasks that would usually take minutes in just a few seconds, all in response to conversational, natural-language instructions. Using Rheo requires “Rheo units”, which are distinct from Splice credits, and cost $10 per 1000. (Free users get 100 units to start off with.)
Rheo has two modes, Assist and Point. Point shows you how to do the task you ask it to complete, not only guiding you through the process with text instructions, but actually pointing out each step with a glowing cursor on the screen. Not sure how to set up sidechain compression on your kick and bass? Struggling to get set up for recording a vocal? Just ask Rheo, and it’ll walk you through it, step-by-step. This will be immensely helpful for beginners, and it’s a welcome alternative to simply having the AI do something for you, which won’t help to build skills in the long run.
Assist goes one step further and actually executes the task for you. As we mentioned, the AI can do almost anything in the DAW, with a few exceptions: it can’t access third-party plugins and it won’t replicate material from commercial songs. (It will pull out a collection of samples from Splice to imitate a given artist’s style, though, which could prove problematic.)
This kind of agentic control can be a real time-saver, taking the faff out of routine or repetitive tasks. For example, you could ask Rheo to create a full multitrack session with subgroups and return tracks, ready to record a full band, or generate an arrangement layout with custom bar lengths and timeline markers for you to fill in with your own material.
It’s pretty good at understanding specific instructions: we asked Rheo to slice up a vocal loop into sixteenth-note chunks and reverse every other chop in an alternating pattern to create a fluttering, glitchy effect, something that would’ve taken at least a minute to do manually, and it nailed it on the first try. Admittedly, saving a few clicks on tasks like these isn’t going to make a dramatic difference to your workflow, but it’s still genuinely useful.
Of course, as well as these more practical tasks, Rheo can take on a more “creative” role. Ask it to design a TB-303-style acid bass patch in Astra, generate a MIDI clip with a specific chord sequence, or even polish up your mix with some EQ and compression, and it will gladly oblige. And yes, Rheo will even produce a full song on demand, pulling samples from Splice and building parts using its stock instruments. (There’s no Suno-style audio generation in Create, though – it’ll write MIDI and pick sounds for you, but it doesn’t generate audio from scratch, other than when it’s producing Variations.)
This is where things get more complicated. Many opponents of AI-powered musical tools justifiably take issue with how they were trained – AI music generator Suno’s early models were trained on millions of copyrighted songs without permission, leading to an outcry among musicians who feel their IP was stolen. Splice tells us that Rheo uses a combination of in-house models and third-party models, including “classic LLMs” that hold a conversation with the user and translate their intent into actions. We’re told that all models were trained using “fully licensed” data, but exactly what that covers is an open question, given that LLMs are typically trained on vast amounts of web data.
Training aside, though, there’s a more fundamental problem. Handing over creative control to an AI agent runs counter to the spirit of creativity – designing patches, writing melodies and digging out samples are the way that artists develop their own sound and imprint a unique personality on their music. They’re essential elements of the creative process, and if delegating them to an AI model makes us less creative, then our music will suffer as a result.
Create’s assistive features could be a real help for beginners learning their craft, but if the software makes it easier for beginners to ask for a melody instead of actually learning to write one, then perhaps it’s not pushing them in the right direction after all. (As one commenter on our Instagram wryly put it: why even make music when music can be made for you?)
Most music tools either make the song for you, or assume you already know how to do everything. Create is different
Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava
For its part, Splice says that it wants Create to “amplify” human creativity, not replace it. “Most music tools either make the song for you, or assume you already know how to do everything. Create is different,” Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava says in a press release – but Rheo can make the song for you, if you let it. Splice wants Create to help you go “deeper into the creative flow”, but go far enough down the AI rabbit hole, and you might stop being creative altogether.
Regardless of where you stand on the ethics and utility of AI in music creation, Rheo is an impressive piece of engineering, and whether we like it or not, agentic AI is spreading fast across the creative software industry, not only in music-making but also apps like Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve. But should DAWs really be following suit?
Splice’s surge in popularity over the past decade has already opened the doors to a new style of paint-by-numbers production that relies on pre-made loops, a method some view as cheating, or at least close to it. We wouldn’t go that far – plenty of brilliant music has been made solely from samples. But this latest push into AI-assisted music-making feels like another step in the same direction, and one that some will see as a step too far. Create feels like music production on easy mode, but what if the hard parts are what make the music your own?
