The way I see it, Denon fluffed the promise of “live stems separation” on the Prime 4+ which is unfortunate for anyone who specifically bought a “plus” on the back of that promise (rememeber it was leaked). Buyer beware. Don’t buy stuff unless it already does what you want - disappointment may follow your market speculation.
However, they have made up for it by adding stem generation for all and are back-porting playback to existing devices for an optional fee. This is a win because a) you don’t have to buy it if it doesn’t cut it for you, and b) it’s a very small fee relative to the cost of most stuff, so there’s a very low cost of entry. Small enough to try it just for kicks.
I’d be fairly surprised if they don’t figure out a way to improve the UI and render 4-waveforms on the display before too long. (yeah, I know I’m speculating now, but I’m risking nothing)
As for the free stuff that’s been added to Engine? Stems are sexy right now, but there has been an absolute ton of very useful features added for $0.00. One that I don’t think gets enough credit is crowdsourcing streaming track analysis by reflecting it back to the cloud. I’ve found that really handy when looking down lists of Tidal tracks to see they are already analysed by someone else’s Prime device.
I don’t think they ever addressed the awkwardness though, of needing to have your device set to the same BPM range as the person who analysed the files, in order to see the data.
I like this feature too. Naturally people will download a track from a streaming service with their unit set to a different BPM range and populate the data for the wider community. It will take much longer with three different ranges but eventually it will populate most common songs and I like that it does that.
As PK alluded,‘it’s a one in three change of seeing the data you need but once more users populate the data, it will get better. It’s something that will grow as streaming gets more popular.
The range restriction seems strange to me because, if they were local files and you analysed them with your range set to X then that data would be visible even if you later changed your range, right?
Your BPMs don’t disappear if/when you change the analysis range - so why should it behave that way with the cloud data? ← rhetorical question.
Well, in principle, good foundations have been chosen here.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the results stored in the cloud are not always correct and unfortunately I don’t know how to change or correct them live and so the benefit is also nullified here.
To be honest, I have a 10-year-old digital mixing console from Geringer that still calculates the BPM better in real time.
And without an exact beatgrit, many functions are just rubbish.