Stems and file quality

Kayya
Kayya Member Posts: 198 Advisor
edited October 2024 in Traktor Software & Hardware

Hello friends,

We see the arrival of the best live stems system to tractor pro is approaching. we are very excited and it seems that there is very little left. Since the emergence of the first live stems, we have completed half of our expectation to this day. ;)

So is the quality of live stems separation proportional to the file quality?

I want to ask this question to you.

Comments

  • Sûlherokhh
    Sûlherokhh Member, Traktor Mapping Mod Posts: 3,622 mod
    edited December 2023

    There has to be a positive correlation. Proportional? Who knows? How do you gauge either quality numerically?

  • lord-carlos
    lord-carlos Member Posts: 4,169 Expert

    Well if you have a bad 96kb/s mp3 of course the stem file will also be bad.

    We don't know how exactly the Traktor implementation works, but you can mess around with other stem programs and see how it sounds with bad files.

    If you want something for free and don't mind the command line, you can check out stemgen made by @axeldelafosse

    Feed it the same track at different bitrates and listen :)

  • mots
    mots Member Posts: 26 Member

    mp3 uses audio masking effect to reduce bit rate en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking

    if the models were trained on lossless audio (which i think would be the case), they might be affected by this in negative way. in a few places there has been mention that lossless codecs are better for stem splitting.

    stemgen ( github.com/axeldelafosse/stemgen) that i use for splitting tracks, disables the support for mp3 altogether. (but you can renable it easily by editing the code. search for ".wav" )

  • Kayya
    Kayya Member Posts: 198 Advisor

    I read it carefully, but I can't fully understand you because my English is not very good.

    I think you see converting live stems to stems format as the same subject. You think the quality of the file depends on the working quality of live stems.

    I hope I interpret you correctly. I use the live stems feature in some performances with Rekordbox. Everyone knows that this feature does not work smoothly and creates distortions. I love him very much, but he is far from professionalism. That's where I started to think about it. I was curious about this with the file quality.

  • Eclectic Lily
    Eclectic Lily Member Posts: 32 Member

    It would also be awesome if Maschine DAW would implement a STEM separation tool of high quality.

    Nobody else would be interested?

    Thank you! 🙏

  • Kubrak
    Kubrak Member Posts: 3,154 Expert

    IMHO, much better would be if Maschine SW had possibility to export music also as STEM file usable in Traktor.... NI could have implement it many years ago. I wonder why they have not done it....

  • Kayya
    Kayya Member Posts: 198 Advisor

    They wanted what was produced in maschine daw to always stay there and be alive and in control. I think that's the case. I think this is a company's perspective.

    If you ask me, exporting them and a lot of things as stems would contribute to the spread of this format. We can't use the most beautiful format in the world because it's not popular.

    We will see that a lot of investments have been made in vain in the live stems feature in the future and the solution is to switch to a format like stems. When that day comes, a new lossless stems format will be released by someone. Software processing loads will disappear. I think we're just waiting for the stems layers to settle in the music culture. We expect the archives to be recorded on legal platforms soon.

    I haven't been able to test the file quality and live stems link that I opened the subject title yet. I wonder the difference between vaw, flac, mp3.

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