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All the NI Stems info you could ever need

Last week, we exclusively hosted a Stems walkthrough video first broadcast live to support the Kontrol D2 launch in the UK. And now this week Native Instruments has got around to launching the full and official Stems site, that quite literally has every scrap of Stems info that you could ever need.

Now I could do the copy and paste routine to create a much longer story, but we’ve been here many times before. You should really check out the whole Stems website in its entirety, and if you still have any questions, we’ll do our level best to get you answers. Check out the FAQ for some quick answers.

All I know for sure is that I’m tired of talking about them. I want to make proper use of the S8 and D2s in The Worxlab and find out if they can live up to the hype. I’m sure they will, but I’m done talking bout the possibilities, and just want to get my hands on them.

C’mon NI — how difficult can it be to create an application that sticks four audio files into an MP4? ;)

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Mark Settle
The Old Owner
I was the editor around these parts for the first two decades of the DJWORX journey. I’m on a creative journey at The Worxlab, and drop in occasionally here. Expect the odd article from me every now and again.
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7 Comments

  2. good thing NI is leaving this open, it might actually take off if serato, ableton, and pioneer we’re all working together on the same thing. And if it’s open why not expand it to 6 or 8 tracks sometime in the future?

  3. Quick question. Can an effect be applied to just one individual stem? For something like adding a flanger effect to the snare drums and leave the rest of the music intact.

  4. Looks like more work than benefit. Why not just export all of your parts at the same bpm, and play them individually as tracks. You could do that right now, and it would be better, because the “stems” would be “free” and not associated with any song. You could still name them as “vocals from …”
    If theres something i’m missing here, tell me, but i think you could do this in virtual dj, today, with no new soft/hardware.

    1. You aren’t wasting a deck for each stem. You don’t have to load all 4 stems to play the track, which you still couldn’t arguably since you couldn’t swap to the master which is also in the same wrapper (NI, Serato, Mixvibes, etc are 4 deck limited, VDJ is 99 max but try to find a skin that isn’t a complete s$#tshow over 6 decks). You can get creative and do things like load a remix of a song in the same stem, or an acapella and remix beat elements to swap with the master, etc. You can switch from the master to the stems seamlessly. Its all contained in one file. As well, its something that ANY DJ software can implement. Its free and open, not proprietary. (This would be like if Serato made Fiips open, instead of locked into Serato DJ as a paid upgrade within the full app. Its huge.) If you don’t see the benefit you aren’t the target market, which isn’t a critique or diss, but it is a different style of DJing.