Native Instruments has released a beta version of the Stem Creator Tool, allowing producers and DJs to craft and create their own Stems for playback in Traktor’s Stem Decks. Read on to get the download and learn how the process works.
Download Stems Creator Tool
Jumping right in – the download is available now here for Mac and PC (note that for the beta Windows users the app will only run on 64-bit systems for now). The tool is completely free for anyone to use, but you’ll need to have four musical elements of a single track ready to export from your DAW into the tool to make use of it.
Stem Creator Tool: How To Get Started
Native Instruments has created the above walkthrough video – but in short the steps that happen for each Stem file are:
- Isolate your track into four individual groups of similar elements (usually Drums, Bass, Main Instrumentation, and Vocals)
- Time-align all of your audio tracks to ensure they will all stay synced and in time when playing back as a Stem
- Load into Stem Creator tool + label your tracks – be sure to give a good descriptor of what exactly you’re loading. You can also choose a color for each Stem and add as much metadata as needed.
- Set Real-Time Dynamics – this is the real-time compression / limiting that the individual Stems go through. The goal is to make sure that your individual stems sound good against the original track – and NI has included both beginner and advanced settings here to give a high level of control to producers that want to make sure their audio sounds just as good when split out into Stems as it does in a final mixdown.
- Export the Stem file into the final .mp4 product, which can be tested right away in Traktor.
On Mastering Stem Decks
One of the biggest questions that many producers and DJs have had about Stem Decks has been “How will mastering work?” The Stem Creator Tool’s Real Time Dynamics section seems to be aiming to put at least some mastering tools right there in the Stem creation process for easy quality control. Here’s NI’s official suggestions for how to create a Stem Deck that sounds as good as a studio master:
“When preparing the four stems in your DAW, they should be processed using the same mastering toolchain as the stereo retail master. You can do this by preparing the four stem parts before the mastering session, and then having the Mastering Engineer master the final mix as well as the four stems all in the same session. This will ensure the four stem parts have the same mastering tweaks as the stereo retail master, such as EQ changes, harmonic exciting, additional reverb, etc. Within the Stem Creator Tool, the Stem Master Dynamics should be used to replicate the final stage of compression and limiting applied to the stereo retail master.”
Anyone had a chance to build their first Stems yet? Let us know how the experience was in the comments.
nice article! but thanks a lot for all guys in the thread who added such great content and opened up so many questions. thansk!
would be not suprised if James Zabiela already did this with his ableton set up on his own tracks. so i wouldn’t call it new or revolutionary, just accessible to all
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You are going to have to master these parts on your own. There is no way the built in mastering will even sound close to being good. Hell, even the tools in most DAWs aren’t good enough for really high end mastering. What I’m doing is setting up four tracks in Ableton, then I put Ozone on each track. I then “master” each track so they sound good together, then export those as the final stems.
Ozone is awesome. Even as a beginner, I can give my audio that little extra polish. No doubt in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, it can give some incredible results.
another way is to prepare the stems when your getting you song mastered!
just add them to the end of the file with lots of space in between, and master the full version and export the stems from the same project and exact same settings.
-learned that from ill.gates
This has gotten me very excited =)
I work for a company that creates the 4 track content. So for us it would have been kind of nice to see visual feed back of all the work at least as a guide line for us, and new users that may be confused as to what in the world is going on inside of Traktor while playing with these stems. Other than that, yeah your right VU meters work just fine. From our stand point it just makes it a bit hard to see if our meta data is correct and such
I’ve done 4 tunes so far today. The process is simple, but I’m having trouble getting the “mastering” settings up to par with the master file I’ve made with high-end plugins. It’s possible to get close, but you may need to go back and make mix changes on the 4 stem parts, specifically for me, the bass comes in too heavy to the Creator Tool’s compression and makes it muddy and pump too much.
Overall I like it though. I understand they can’t really embed a realtime mastering chain that perfectly matches pro studio level stuff, and that’s fine. Another gripe is lack of a lossless export option. They’ve said before that the format can accommodate ALAC encoding, but their tool only exports AAC right now. A bummer since my previous live setup was Ableton with 4 part AIFF stems for each of my songs, but the trade-off to be able to play a DJ/live hybrid set in Traktor with my whole library is totally worth it.
Lossless will be in the full version.
Can you say more, the only lossless audio format supported by mp4 is AAC ALAC which Traktor doesn’t currently support.
That is wildly not the case. I use ALACs exclusively in Traktor.
(AAC ALAC isn’t a thing btw, AAC is a lossy algorithm)
Create a stem file using the ALAC codec and you will see for yourself.
It says in the email that apple lossless encoding option is in the works. Which I assume means it will be in the official release. At least at some point soon.
Waited a long time for this tool to come out. It gave us a lot of problems at our studio this morning, but we finally got it to work. Its really hard to get excited about it when i cant visually see any Stem feed back on Traktor with out the D2 or S8. Sure you can use any controller to work with the stems, but it would still be kind of nice to have some sort of visual guideline
You can map the stems VU’s to the controller. The F1 has VU meters on the pads automatically. It’s good enough for me. Who DJ’s while staring at the laptop screen anyway? Even if they were there I’m pretty sure I’d refer to the VU’s more than the screen, but that’s just me. U might want to give it a try.
I work for a company that creates the 4 track content. So for us it would have been kind of nice to see visual feed back of all the work at least as a guide line for us, and new users that may be confused as to what in the world is going on inside of Traktor while playing with these stems. Other than that, yeah your right VU meters work just fine. From our stand point it just makes it a bit hard to see if our meta data is correct and such
That’s understandable. I bet it will be a feature in Traktor 3. Whenever that happens. Did you see their response as to why they haven’t done it yet?
As a company that creates the 4 track content you might be able to afford a D2 or S8.
They are working on it and they’ll get it out. Of course their is some economic thoughts behind this too and prioritized optimization for non NI equipment lower.