MAKING TRACKS STUDIO…HARDWARE…SOFTWARE…
XTRAX STEMS 2: CLEANER CONTROL
By Wesley Bryant-King
XTRAX STEMS 2: Creative uses for the vocals & more.
DJ TIMES
NAMM 2019
Back at the Winter NAMM Show in January 2018, I was introduced to a new product from a small outfit by the name of Audionamix, which was showing off a then-new product called XTRAX STEMS. The promise was a great one for DJs and remixers: Take a song file or track of your choice and, through sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities, extract it into three stems – beats, vocals and “the rest.” The demo on the show floor was intriguing; I’m not sure I was fully convinced, but the potential was certainly there, and the company quickly provided me with a copy to test. But let me be blunt here: I was pretty unimpressed at my first look. The separated content was full of digital artifacts — at least after processing a small sampling of test tracks. And I’m not sure I could take the resulting vocal stems, use them in a remix, and be particularly satisfied with the end result. However, over the course of 2018, Audionamix made some improvements to the software, as well as the behind-the-scenes, cloud-based processing that performs the actual dirty work of separating the stems. Because that work is offloaded to a cloud-based set of algorithms and methods, they can be updated and improved over time without
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Audionamix Software: Stems for studio & DJ apps.
requiring end-users to do software updates. It also provides a sample set to feed the machine-learning beast that’s much broader than any single user’s utilization would provide. But the improvements made in this case did require an upgrade, dubbed XTRAX STEMS 2, the subject of this review. Let’s start by calibrating expectations here. If you’ve ever produced a music track — regardless of the genre — you’ll likely appreciate just how extraordinary the technical challenge is that Audionamix is trying to solve. In a DAW (Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Pro Tools, etc.), a producer is basically taking individual, discrete tracks of audio — each of which can occupy any range of audio frequencies — and merging them together into a single, cohesive whole. The elements can be panned and effected up one side and down the other in the process. Audionamix is trying to engineer software and algorithms that are capable of basically undoing that to some degree, to provide you with a usable set of source files, from an audio original that could have been produced, mixed and mastered with a virtually infinite array of processing methods and styles. Said another way, what Audionamix is trying to do with XTRAX STEMS 2 is nothing short of technologically impossible. And yet, bless ’em, they’ve taken a good, solid swing at it. So how is the product today? And how usable are the results? I think the best answers to those questions are “pretty good,” and “it depends” — respectively. So, let’s take a deeper look. The XTRAX STEMS 2 process starts with a single, produced, rendered, mastered and final piece of music in digital form that you provide. The format is up to you; the product supports most formats, but prefers WAV files. (Your source is converted prior to processing if it’s in any other format.) You drag and drop it into the product’s interface, and the processing begins.You have a choice of algorithms: Advanced (which is new in XTRAX STEMS 2), Generic, and Automatic. The file is uploaded to Audionamix’s servers, where it’s processed, and downloaded back in three parts, as mentioned earlier, labeled Vocals, Drums and Music. The process, end-to-end, requires several minutes, depending on the track duration, and the speed of your internet connectivity. New in XTRAX STEMS 2, you can adjust the separation balance after processing to emphasize different elements. Once you’re happy with it, you can save the parts back out, either as WAV files ready to bring into a DAW, or as a single Stems file (the Native Instruments multitrack audio format), ready to bring into Traktor or other Stems-compatible gear for DJ performance. While it’s safe to say that the results in XTRAX STEMS 2 are indeed better than what I experienced the first time around, if you’re expecting to get three
