I have absolutely no musical talent whatsoever, so this is mostly a curiosity question....

What are the softwares out there that are used for recording music? For example, I've seen Rick Beato and some other music production folks on Youtube using a software that separates the various instrumental parts of a song into different tracks that can be listened to separately. Like you can hear just the drum track or the bass track.

Anyone know what they're using? I'd love to be able to listen to isolated parts of songs, just to get a better understanding of them.

I think last time I saw a Beato video he was using ProTools or maybe Cubase. There are plenty of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), many commercial, a few for free.

What Rick and others are showing you are "stems." That is, audio files that are broken down per-instrucment/channel/track. There is software out there that will break an audio file (say, .mp3 or .wav) down in to drum, vocal, guitar tracks, but they're hit or miss.

I personally use Ableton Live, Cubase Pro, or Cubasis (on iPad), depending on where I'm at and what I'm doing.

When I ran my studio I used Cubase for a sequencer. Everything else (gear) was analog synths.

Try Ableton.

There is no software that can isolate tracks from a stereo mix. You can play tricks with EQ/phase to make some parts more or less audible.

What you're seeing with Rick's videos is him using the "stems". When songs are recorded they use a multi-track recorder. Each instrument (and often multiple takes of the same instrument) is recorded to a separate track. The number of modern tracks is unlimited (well, maybe by storage space and processing power).

When you hear Rick isolate instruments it's because he's gained access to the multi-track stems of the recording. These are sometimes released by the owners. In some cases they are licensed (as in Guitar Hero). Sometimes they are just pirated and copied.

With any modern Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) you can import whole projects, or individual tracks. On playback you can isolate any track (or any number of tracks), muting the others. It's called "solo".

There are tons of great DAWs now. Some better than others. Protools, Luna, Cubase, Reaper, Garage Band, Logic, etc.

But without the multi-track source material, you cannot isolate individual instruments.

In the vocational school district where I work, we have an audio program with the state of the art recording studio. We start the students out using ProTools.