No, never used.
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So my completely unscientific findings from years of DJing and being an early adopter of lossless audio files, firstly WAV and then AIFF. In general Iāve found the lossless to be slightly āfullerā in its sound than a lossy file. Iāve always found that I have the gain set a tad higher with lossy. This is either a coincidence that most of my MP3 tracks are mastered quieter than the Lossless, or itās down to the format.
For the actual sound itself itās not night and day different as some will have you believe (usually the same type of people who rattle on about colour science in photography or some waffle about their expensive red wine) but there is definitely a difference.
The final curveball here is vinyl. I did a little experiment a while back that those of you whoāve seen my ādj boothā pics in the other thread will know I canāt replicate again at the minute. I took the 45 of William Devaughn - be thankful for what you got (disco mix) and I played it through my Radius 4 into the Presonus sub 8 and focal shape 50 monitors. I then swapped between that and a digital version, Here are my findings:
With the Ortofon digitals connected the vinyl sound was quite harsh and a bit loud (they are extremely loud), the digital file sounded like digital does, you know what you get. Now hereās the curveball, and again purely unscientific here, when I played the 45 through an Ortofon OM cartridge at 2g tracking, the vinyl sounded much better and to my ear, a nicer or more pleasant sound than the digital file.
Im sure that there are nerds with machines who will argue to the cows come home that this is impossible, but im just simply relaying what my own thoughts are playing an old disco record through my fairly simple, mid range audio setup.
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I have found a workaround / solution after seeing a separate thread in the bug report section. For the random tracks that wonāt work with stems, Iāve tried some of them doing a āre-import track informationā. Even though the track information hasnāt actually changed, after doing this, stems creation suddenly works as it should on the tracks.
My database has been around since the early days of Prime 4 over 5 years ago (though Iāve now moved on to the 4+), so not sure if something has happened to some of the tracks as part of one of the upgrades from wherever I started (version 1.4 or something I think). Anyway, at least I have a way of solving the issue now it seems - thanks all for the suggestions.
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What you describe regarding the stylus isnāt impossible at all and actually perfectly explainable. Styluses do affect audio reproduction so it is perfectly understandable why you perceived the differences.
In the end preference is subjective, vinyl is often considered āwarmerā, often because of the high end roll off. Some crackles here and there can also contribute to the perception of a subjectively more pleasant sound. Objectively it is worse than a 4416 wav file though in terms of fidelity. But preference in taste is very real as well, although subjective.
Regarding lossless versus lossly, you can test this yourself with Foobar2000 and the abx plug-in. It will let you run some tests to see if you perceive any difference between the 2 in a more scientific way, since any biases are eliminated because you donāt know to which of the 2 files you are listening. Eliminating biases is crucial, we all have them and they affect us usually more than we realize. Or try the tests on the website I refered to earlier 
When comparing 2 files it is also crucial to level match the fragments within no less than -0.1dB btw, because we perceive louder as better. This is just how our brains work.
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The impossible part was me preferring the output of the analogue sound over the digital, not the difference between the stylus, which of course will have a huge impact given their vastly different designs.
To my ear, and completely ignoring any nostalgic bs to do with pops and crackles, the actual music and vocals are more pleasant from the 45 pressing, the whole thing just melds together in a more pleasing way.
Anyway, I said above I donāt want to start a boring techy audiophile discussion so Iāll leave it at that, I have better things to be doing with my life, like putting my head in a kettle of boiling water.
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This is great to know. It would be interesting to see if it solves it for other users having the same issue. It would be good info to give out going forward to the people who are experiencing it too.
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I do understand that, regarding digital vs vinyl. As mentioned there can be many variables, like for instance simply different versions of the masters. Or you just like the extra thd, which is totally fine.
The latter can also be perfectly recorded and reproduced on a decent digital setup, just to put things in perspective. Anyway I understand you donāt want to zoom in on this futher and I suppose it is a bit off topic as well, so all good. Enjoy your water
After many many raves & experiencing the Valve Sound system + 25 years on noisy building sites, I can safely say I canāt tell the difference between mono & Dolby atmos let alone mp3 & wave 
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I was thinking the exact same thing when I read that.
For those seeking info on how much storage it uses and time, I have most of my songs in FLAC, they take about the same space as the song. -At the moment 44gb stem files for 2600 songs. The Flac songs are about 60GB so you can expect double the size or less.
- For Mp3 I have seen that it also takes about the same size as FLAC files so you could expect 3x to 4x the size when using stems.
Time for analisis: I have a AMD 3600X 6 core 3.6Ghz CPU 12 threads and analizing songs it uses all of my CPU power available(gpu is not used). I see about 200 songs per hour, so it takes its time.
Still thank you denon for the tool, we will gladly pay 
10$ ha, engine trying to get money for new research and development, because the stems are mediocre.
How about you jokers finish creating a useable desktop app then go from there.
Bug report, just mimic the rekordbox software easy as that.
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I use FLAC anyway so all good
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i just wana say thx you so much denon team ,mad respect to bring stem ,i am super happy ,keep it up with the good work for more new feature update in the future ,bless
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I could totally see this evolving in an engine dj āstemsā-service.
Two concurrent flows:
- Local prepared stems (current implementation)
- Ad-hoc / Streaming stems (online stems calc)
For the Ad-hoc / Streaming steams; Engine DJ to run a webservice which can take file upload from enginedj device and can act as a middle man for streaming services. From the engine dj device you would need to indicate that you want to use stems for a specific song. In the background the file gets uploaded / API streaming service is send and the webservice does all the processing; and return the files to the device for storage and usage.
The webservice would allow Denon to the full range of devices (including older chipsets) to be long term supported. Commercially it could work with top up subscription credits i.e. $10 for 10,000 calculations (not sure what a fair+competitive+profitable price point would be). By using cloud services, the webservice could easily scale up/down based on demand. By creating a financial influx for stems, this would cover for further stem focuses R&D based on market demand. Even supplying this Stems service for streaming outside of the enginedj realm could be an option. While processing power gets cheaper over time, the service becomes cheaper. New top tier devices could be sold with i.e. a lifetime amount of stems credits.
Is that the Rekordbox that requires me to confirm two pop up windows each time I drag new music into a playlist? Whereas Engine just adds the new tracks without asking. Or the Rekordbox that wonāt let you see any new music on your USB stick if you donāt remember to click āupdate collectionā from the weird little hidden sub menu before you eject?
Or is it the Rekordbox that has serious positioning issues on my MacBook whereby mouse clicks are about 6mm out of place, with the only solution being to enter full screen mode.
Is this the perfection you speak of?
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Mimic Rekordbox? You mean REMOVING Stem from standalone units?
Itās simple to achieve that: you can simply not pay and youāll have the exact same Stem capability as Pioneer offers for professional gear: NONE.
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After Update to 4.20 Iāve notice that played tracks from all streaming services are no longer visible in Engine after sync from USB Stick.
In 4.10 you could see the played tracks and rate or comment the tracks and sync back to the USB Media and be able to use all sort criteria on the unit. I can only see Streaming Tracks from BEFORE the 4.20 update in Engine.
Can someone check that please?
Thanks
I think you might be right here.
Iāll do some investigating myself later tonight as I remember a handful of tracks from Amazon Music and thinking back, there should have been more.
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It affects all streaming services - seems to be a bug - very annoying
Yep they do things a lot better than engine. Mojaxx said it himself, regarding the fact you canāt listen to your stems on the desktop app. āpioneer wouldnāt have released the feature, they would have considered it a messy solution. ā. The things you mentioned donāt seem like major issues at all to tell you the truth.
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