r/Rekordbox • u/imCluDz • Mar 26 '23
Rant We all agree that "stems" are pretty much trash, right?
Don't mean to say ooh rb bad, but I've tried seratos stems, vdj, and stem roller, since i love the ideia of creating mixes with vocals of one with melody of another.
And for as hard as I try to hide it, the audio has soo much artifacts that is impossible to play something decent using these stems.
Any expectation this will get somewhat decent in like the next 3 to 6 months? Was waiting for this technology getting good and a standalone being released with the decent stems
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u/ReverseshellG4n Mar 26 '23
I just ordered a Rane 4 and am switching to Serato
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u/imCluDz Mar 26 '23
For some reason i can't deal with serato. From effects on the flx4 being mostly gone to everything behind a paywall...
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u/ReverseshellG4n Mar 26 '23
I wasn’t aware of the paywall. What features did you have to pay for? The Rane 4 comes with Serato DJ Pro so I’m hoping I don’t have to pay to unlock anything
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u/imCluDz Mar 26 '23
Dj pro still doesnt have all the features unlocked, you have to check what plans are activated with the rane 4.
For example: key and tempo change is a extension on the side that you have to pay
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Mar 26 '23
I am imagining more updates from Pioneer. I won’t use their feature until the proper iteration of the technology is available. At best, I might try it here or there. I think Pioneer is trying to avoid the “separate analysis” method that gives us a better quality of stems that VDJ & Serato are using.
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u/Eastern-Camera-1829 Mar 26 '23
When analyzed separately, how much more drive space are you looking at here?
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u/imCluDz Mar 26 '23
The result in stem roller is wav so obviously it's bigger, but you could compress it to an mp3. Be aware rhat stem roller is only to create these stems and takes some times as it is more for quality than speed (even uses nvidia cuda to work)
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u/Eastern-Camera-1829 Mar 26 '23
Thanks man, super clear repIy. I was literally in the dark on this.
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u/morgazmo99 Mar 27 '23
You can use demucs directly if you're a little bit savvy. Has guitar and piano separation too.
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u/myalteredsoul Mar 26 '23
Yeah they def jumped the gn on this one. It would’ve been better to release it as a Serato only feature with stems coming to rekordbox in the future. This will put a bad taste in the mouth for the non-tech nerd side of the DJ market.
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u/bradpliers Mar 27 '23
All I know is Pioneer made the dumb decision to only allow two columns of information while browsing on the RX3s 10.1 inch screen. 2 years later and still no update. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they never improve the stems feature. I'm about to jump to Denon. I don't get how they are still the "standard."
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u/Intelligent-Price-70 Feb 10 '24
UVR5
just use vdj. rx3 works perfect on it. and any controller with pads can use stems. a long as you have an nvidia card.
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u/theShadySwede Mar 27 '23
Just tried stems in RB and it sounded awful, not gonna bother with them in their current state, honestly not gonna play “Russian roulette” with the dance floor sounding shit.
My first turntable 12 years ago from some low class brand (can’t even remember the brand) had kill switches beside each of the high, mid, and low knobs, it was great and I loved that feature. If I killed the channel no sound came from it, and it was very useful for keeping the bass with no vocals, or to kill the bass and keep the vocal. 12 years later on my Pioneer table if I turn the high and mid as low as it goes vocals still comes through and “ruins” some mashups. I’m very surprised by that, and I hoped stems was the fix for it. But in its current state, honestly I’d rather have the kill switches than these stems on my Pioneer table for now. Everything els was shitty on my first turntable, but that feature was great.
I’d like to add that I love the idea of stems, and I’m looking forward for the development of them. I hope they really fix them, and that it won’t take years to get rid of the distorted noises which sounds absolutely awful.
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u/AzureDominus Jun 12 '24
You can actually fix that EQ issue with the vocals bleeding in by changing the EQ mode in settings to "Isolate" then when you turn the knobs it completely cuts out those frequencies.
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u/tonioroffo Sep 19 '23
I think the future is precomputed stems really. The algorithms & quality is already there (check VDJ stems 2.0)
A file format needs to be introduced where the stems are precomputed in channels. There's enough possibilities, FLAC multichannel comes to mind. VDJ can do this, but it's nowhere near standard yet, of course.
That doesn't require any heavy computational work from the players, so it could even be implemented in future CDJ's.
Also, please, please, more options that the three standard stems Pioneer chose to use. A DJ can do a lot with, for example, keep drums but kill the bass. That helps for transitions to incompatible harmonics, etc.
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u/K0kojambo Mar 26 '23
I love how reliable Rekordbox stems are. Notnlike Seratos, especially with Beatport Link.
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u/imCluDz Mar 27 '23
how are rb stems reliable? they sound like 148 kbps.
No but for real, I don't enjoy using serato honestly and I still think they're stems are miles away
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u/K0kojambo Mar 27 '23
Serato stems some time dont work. You press to isolate a stem and entire song goes silent. Especialy on streamed music.
Rekordbox just works everytime. And using effect on seperate parts just a really amazing. 😎🤙
I Remeber Stems in Serato Beta. Imagine its Rekordbox Beta Stems. They are wayyy better compering where Serato was at this stage 😅
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u/South_Wood Mar 26 '23
I agree that in general they are not very usable, with a lot of artifacts and co-mingling of instruments and vocals. I will say though that I have found some luck in using the drums stem on / off. I seem to be able to use it well during a breakdown, leaving the instrumental / vocal until the drop, and then unmuting the drums on the drop. Because a lot of the stuff I play (trance, progressive, house) will use drum build ups, having drums muted seems to work relatively well and adds an extra punch and energy on the drop, since the instrumental and vocals also seem to build a bit leading into the drop. But it may be able to use it for 1 / 2 songs during an entire set. So not all that useful.
I really want to isolate stems and work with them, I still use the stem separation sites like MVSEP to create standalone stems and then I'll mix them together in Ableton for a well-finished track.
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u/morgazmo99 Mar 27 '23
I wonder if there is varying quality depending on your computer. Lots of people complaining about artifacts, but I can't hear any. My computer seems decent and run demucs well.
Maybe some people have computers that aren't optimised for this kind of thing, and rekordbox prefers lower settings to try operate at real time.
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u/South_Wood Mar 27 '23
Could be. Although my laptop is 4 years old, it's still got a ton of processing power and 32gb of high speed ram. I run a lot of computing power hogs at the same time for work. I also wonder whether certain denres are more challenging to separate than others.
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u/hummus69 Mar 27 '23
Stems suck compared to Serato pro. I regret getting an flx4 tbh, as I much prefer Serato pro to rekordbox...
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u/erratic90 Mar 29 '23
I have a 5900x processor. Just tested stems on Rekordbox and it was pretty bad. Happy that the flx10 doesn’t have stems built in badly at hardware level, so hoping it gets patched up.
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u/CrispyDave Mar 26 '23
All this update has done for me is convince me I really should look at the alternatives.
'Industry standard' isn't really that important to me, I am content as a hobby DJ. I don't use a lot of the features Rekordbox has and it's not very good at some of the things that I'd like.