Is it just me or does STEMS SUCK in Standalone?

Support and discussion for all of Akai’s modern standalone MPCs including the MPC X / X SE, MPC Live 1, 2 & 3, MPC One / One+, MPC Key 37/61.
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Re: Is it just me or does STEMS SUCK in Standalone?

By Neodymium Fri Jul 19, 2024 3:52 pm
TXDelta1010 wrote:
I bought the almost all of the music plugins (flex beat, jura, mpc instrument collection, mini d, and stems), and I'm not super impressed. I would think inmusic buying moog would really step their game up with these plugins competing with Native Instruments (they sound ok, but not $767.98 good). I can get Komplete Ultimate, Roland Cloud, or Korg Collections for that price, and they all have decades of refined sounds.


I think Jura and the Mini D are good for what they are, nothing out there, but then they are based on 40+ year old analogues. And I don't see buy Moog as a sign of advancing synthesis, Moog live in the past and live off the past. They've got a little creative with the subharmonicon, the spectravox and labyrinth, but they are nerdy instruments based on old ideas. Moog doesn't create new synthesis ideas, just ways of putting them together. Even though they have semi modular that fit in eurorack, they don't make any euro racks. That seems to be where a lot of adventurous Synthesis ideas are implemented in the hardware world.

Th OPx4 is a really adventurous FM synth. Year FM is not new, but the way they implemented it, and the modulation options, it's pretty impressive that's in my MPC. I hope to see more of that to be honest. Electric is a modelling synth, I hope to see more modelling synths.

But considering the advances in AI in the last 5 years, to be running that on 10 year old tech. I don't think it's realistic to sound that great. Lots of time parts of a separation don't sound that great on a desktop machine. But useable in a mix. I'm out of my bound here though, I'm not a sampling guy, but I think it should be treated as place holder, while working out ideas, to come back to later and set up properly with some processing power. But then again Hip Hop is weird like that (not that I make hip hop, but it's a hip hop machine), driven dirty beats, great, 12bit beats, great, f'ing autotune dialed up to 100, for so many great ( I don't get this one). So year maybe unnatural stems will be a thing too. We seem to care how it sounds, but just takes producers who don't and a fan base to lap it up, and it's a thing. Case in pint Mumble Rap (I miss you Gift of Gab)

Re: Is it just me or does STEMS SUCK in Standalone?

By Planemo Sat Jul 20, 2024 8:47 am
In answer to the thread title, yes it does suck. I wasn't expecting studio quality stems or indeed desktop quality but what we are left with on standalone is unusable IMO. Loads of artifacts and whats left sounds like its been through some meat grinder of a filter. At this point I'm struggling to find a use for what it spits out. Yes I'm sure someone can do something with it, maybe as an FX track or something but I would suggest that most will struggle to use it 'as intended'.

I'm not losing my mind over it, it was only 10 quid, but I just wanted to post my thoughts for anyone that was considering it. If you're precious about a tenner you might want to try and see if you can get someone to demo it to you first.

Re: Is it just me or does STEMS SUCK in Standalone?

By BackOnDaMPC Sat Jul 20, 2024 11:13 am
Neodymium wrote:
TXDelta1010 wrote:So year maybe unnatural stems will be a thing too. We seem to care how it sounds, but just takes producers who don't and a fan base to lap it up, and it's a thing. Case in pint Mumble Rap (I miss you Gift of Gab)
I couldn't agree more.
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Re: Is it just me or does STEMS SUCK in Standalone?

By Lampdog Sat Jul 20, 2024 11:02 pm
Planemo wrote:If you're precious about a tenner you might want to try and see if you can get someone to demo it to you first.

I took a few loops, stemmed them, sent the project to a few friends.
The responses….



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Re: Is it just me or does STEMS SUCK in Standalone?

By Lampdog Sun Jul 21, 2024 1:19 am
Standalone STEMS aint the best, I didn’t expect it to be, STILL find uses for it and I’m not disappointed.

meh - i like the artifacts!!!

By marctronixx Mon Jul 22, 2024 5:34 pm
Lampdog wrote:Standalone STEMS aint the best, I didn’t expect it to be, STILL find uses for it and I’m not disappointed.


man i came here to say this. I actually like tweakin' the stems to take advantage of the "charm" this version of STEMs have! put it in some gumbo and you can
cook up something cool! experiment!!

i gotta say, sometimes this place reminds me of gearslutz -- just constant bickering and complainin' about everything. most posters here are not happy and just come here to bash. i spend more time here for mpc related things to get away from that but over the last couple years its all i see.

may of us know the limitations of the mpcs and im still amazed at what inmusic can do to squeeze out every bit of performance they can out of these machines. the stems may get better - or not. we dont know. but it would be nice to read from people who get on with this feature and use it in creative ways vs constant bashing about it. do yall even make music or do you just come here to troll inmusic?

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Re: meh - i like the artifacts!!!

By richie Mon Jul 22, 2024 10:28 pm
marctronixx wrote:may of us know the limitations of the mpcs and im still amazed at what inmusic can do to squeeze out every bit of performance they can out of these machines. the stems may get better - or not. we dont know. but it would be nice to read from people who get on with this feature and use it in creative ways vs constant bashing about it. do yall even make music or do you just come here to troll inmusic?


I think it's great that you are coming from a positive attitude angle, it's easier on the nerves and general health.

The issue from my interpret that are some people that are not technically inclined enough to understand how hardware works (I'm not stating this is the case about you personally, I mean in general terms), how plugins work and are expecting stems to output the same quality of processing that a much more powerful computer can handle.

As mpc-tutor noted, the algorithm used is a lower quality one to accommodate the lack of processing power the MPC has to this, so it isn't likely it'll "improve". If I could come up with an analogy, it's like people wanting to encode video in 4k high bitrate on a machine that could only computationally encode in 240P real player format.

Even with my higher end workstation, cpu processing still takes a decent amount of time which is why I utilize my GPU to handle stem processing as its many times faster and far high quality output.

But I agree, maybe the "Charm" of having a sh*itty stem output could end up giving a different flavor to peoples beats.

I love you all
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Re: Is it just me or does STEMS SUCK in Standalone?

By Ultros Wed Jul 24, 2024 11:45 am
I havent tried stand alone stems or the latest rom yet. I gotta say though, kudos to akai for atleast trying to give people what they wanted. I kinda feel bad for the developers, i bet they work hard trying to make stuff happen then they release it and everyone craps all over their work.

Programming signal stuff isnt the easiest there is a lot of math that goes into creating that sorta stuff that only a few people on earth are really any good at creating. The fact they made it work at all on our machines is pretty epic. Whether its their algo not not, or a lesser algo, the fact its even works on the current mpc is amazing.

When I started making music in the 90s the idea of stemming anything digitally was crazy talk. instead we had to do it manually with low pass, band pass and high pass filters and eqing. i still do it that way today if i want to isolate a sound from something mild that i think i can wash the evil out of.

Even though i dont own it, thanks akai, thanks inMusic for trying to give us something we might like.

Re: Is it just me or does STEMS SUCK in Standalone?

By 40Beatz Wed Jul 24, 2024 1:11 pm
Ultros wrote:I havent tried stand alone stems or the latest rom yet. I gotta say though, kudos to akai for atleast trying to give people what they wanted. I kinda feel bad for the developers, i bet they work hard trying to make stuff happen then they release it and everyone craps all over their work.

Programming signal stuff isnt the easiest there is a lot of math that goes into creating that sorta stuff that only a few people on earth are really any good at creating. The fact they made it work at all on our machines is pretty epic. Whether its their algo not not, or a lesser algo, the fact its even works on the current mpc is amazing.

When I started making music in the 90s the idea of stemming anything digitally was crazy talk. instead we had to do it manually with low pass, band pass and high pass filters and eqing. i still do it that way today if i want to isolate a sound from something mild that i think i can wash the evil out of.

Even though i dont own it, thanks akai, thanks inMusic for trying to give us something we might like.


:worthy:

Re: Is it just me or does STEMS SUCK in Standalone?

By J.O.BEATS Wed Jul 24, 2024 6:14 pm
Ultros wrote:I havent tried stand alone stems or the latest rom yet. I gotta say though, kudos to akai for atleast trying to give people what they wanted. I kinda feel bad for the developers, i bet they work hard trying to make stuff happen then they release it and everyone craps all over their work.

Programming signal stuff isnt the easiest there is a lot of math that goes into creating that sorta stuff that only a few people on earth are really any good at creating. The fact they made it work at all on our machines is pretty epic. Whether its their algo not not, or a lesser algo, the fact its even works on the current mpc is amazing.

When I started making music in the 90s the idea of stemming anything digitally was crazy talk. instead we had to do it manually with low pass, band pass and high pass filters and eqing. i still do it that way today if i want to isolate a sound from something mild that i think i can wash the evil out of.

Even though i dont own it, thanks akai, thanks inMusic for trying to give us something we might like.


Splitting a sample up into different freq and processing each band to taste is a great way to add “flavor” to a sample not just isolating sounds. I still do this all the time as it’s really easy in to do in the mpc. I haven’t found a good use for mpc stems yet but I’m sure I will

Re: Is it just me or does STEMS SUCK in Standalone?

By HouseWithoutMouse Wed Jul 24, 2024 6:14 pm
Ultros wrote:I gotta say though, kudos to akai for atleast trying to give people what they wanted. I kinda feel bad for the developers, i bet they work hard trying to make stuff happen then they release it and everyone craps all over their work.


It looks like it was Zplane who made the stem separation. The same company who makes the Elastique time stretching thing for Ableton Live, Akai MPC and Force, and others. Inmusic bought a product and made a user interface over it.

https://licensing.zplane.de/technology#stems

Maybe it's the "efficient" variety that's running in MPC standalone. "STEMS EFFICIENT runs on low-performance CPUs" says the brochure.

Edit. It IS exactly STEMS EFFICIENT. It's said here https://www.akaipro.com/stems.html
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Re: Is it just me or does STEMS SUCK in Standalone?

By Monotremata Wed Jul 24, 2024 7:55 pm
HouseWithoutMouse wrote:
Ultros wrote:I gotta say though, kudos to akai for atleast trying to give people what they wanted. I kinda feel bad for the developers, i bet they work hard trying to make stuff happen then they release it and everyone craps all over their work.


It looks like it was Zplane who made the stem separation. The same company who makes the Elastique time stretching thing for Ableton Live, Akai MPC and Force, and others. Inmusic bought a product and made a user interface over it.

https://licensing.zplane.de/technology#stems

Maybe it's the "efficient" variety that's running in MPC standalone. "STEMS EFFICIENT runs on low-performance CPUs" says the brochure.

Edit. It IS exactly STEMS EFFICIENT. It's said here https://www.akaipro.com/stems.html


Not shocking. That's where the 'Warp' algorithms come from too. I believe Cubase is using Elastique Pro as well.
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