Anyone using Stems?

As title says. I purchased an S4 in January and am just getting into them.

 

Yes and no.
As I'm no producer my access to stems or tracks in stem format is limited. The catalogue available being also very limited. So in the end I'm using stem tracks mostly for individual stems that I deconstruct in remix sets (remix decks being for me much more manageable in a sense and more practical - as a standard asset in my set up, than having to adapt controls to a stem deck that I would use twice a year (because I just don't have anything to feed them ^^).
If my collection would be in stems format would I use them extensively, hell yeah. It's awesome. But...

 

I was but more laptop free now, stems are great but NI have not bothered to fix the analysis problem for over 12 months - fkin useless support

 

Thanks both for your replies. I quite like playing them but I suspect less and less are being produced. Maybe less and less people are buying them too.

I know what you mean about anaylisis issue. Almost every track the beat grid is off and needs manually tapping.

 

we used have some great labels on it, yoshitoshi, defeted, toolroom, 8bit, get physical and now nothing.

The stems analysis issue is where you analyse a track and it fails, you try to load it to a deck and it says stem track not analysed.

I have told NI what causes the issue and they did fak all about it - disgusted in their customer service...

My D2's are getting very dusty but no point selling as worth nowt

 

No. it's useless.

 

Wouldn't say thier useless, I quite like mixing with them. It's more like they just didn't take off as they hoped. Shame though as it's a great format.

 

there are not enough of them, and also mixing is not the most important part for the party. people doesn't care, they care about track selection. and fixing the stupid browser in traktor should be top priority, because it's not very helpful on the most important part of creating a great party.

 

Stems useless.

 

Yes I have used STEMS. Mainly I use them to make karaoke tracks. But I have had to go back in and re-sequence some as entire sections of the song are missing, or I had to manually use FFT to change the pitch for notes they got wrong, or in general, had to clean up some noisy samples and correct timing. It would be great if they were available professionally as released to match the official versions for source material to create remixes with, or to copy out instruments and beats for your own music, but I don't see that being very viable in the current situation. With stems being the bread and butter of musicians you might have better luck just biting the bullet and buying FLStudio or another samples sequencer to recreate the songs you want and add effects and compression. With how much money some companies want for a single STEMS file, that is more useful in the long run.

 

Unfortunately no on was ever going to be able to make use of STEMs.
NI built the cart before the horse so they ended up with a rickshaw, they have a buggy but there simply are no horses to pull it.

Stems is one of those things that is hard to pull off because if you pay people to put their music in the format you lose money and if you try to charge them to put their music in your format they will never use it so very little music is ever going to be in your format.

We live in a world where no one is making music that is so complicated that you can't recreate the parts you want or the entire song less the vocals.
Stems would have been a great 1990's product but in 2019 not so much.

Just wish all the wasted Stem development could have gone directly into Traktor.

 

I really like stems for djing. I wanted to buy a Kontrol S5 to use them better, but it has been discontinued to early, so I didn't buy it awaiting an mk2 or something similar, which never came... Same story for the D2: Several people I talked about said the same thing: why invest in something wich will prevent you from updating your system or stop working sooner or later? A D2 with built in soundcard could have been the gamechanger for people interested in live-remixing (like me) more than in classical "wait-for-the-right-spot-2-deck-djing" (which is just boring after 25 years of djing)...

 

Great stuff. I like DJing with them too. For me there are plenty out there still to choose from. I'm only a serous hobbyist anyway so it suits my needs.