Hi all,
I’ve been working on a format for storing stems alongside the final mix of a track with the goal of having a non-patent encumbered alternative to the Native Instruments stems format for use by DAWs and DJ applications.
My background is in mixing with stems while live DJing, however, and not in music production and DAWs (though I do use Audacity for multi-track recording of my DJ sets pretty frequently!).
I’m hoping some folks who know more about the DAW/recorder scene will have some feedback about the format. As it stands right now, it’s mostly compatible with Audacity for import due to it being a profile of Matroska, but can’t be exported (though being more focused on recording than production I’m not even sure if this is a good fit for Audacity in general). A few general questions I have:
-
Do people use Audacity for music production, either for exporting a track you produced or for importing an existing track and remixing it?
- If so would audacity want to export limiter/compressor settings for the final mix and is the scheme described in the spec sufficient for basic production use (if Audacity even has the concept of a master bus or similar? I’m not super familiar with mixing with it)?
-
If a music producer were to hand you a stem file for remixing, what other features would you want it to have to make sure your mix was the best it could be?
If you have any ideas, I’d be very grateful for your feedback.
If you’re technically minded and are curious, the initial draft of the specification for the format is here in various formats:
And here is the current version at the time of this post (draft 07) rendered as HTML:
