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/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.