I honestly think, and this is only a complete guess. They have spent the past few months focusing on perfecting Stems (or at least getting it up to a good standard) on the Akai side, and I think that will then port across to the Prime gear. PK has alluded to it above and I think thats a spot on take.
The public Stems BETA has been a complete mess in reality, and not through any fault of the company (aside from perhaps the decision to announce it), so I think the hard work done by whoever is testing Akai stuff might be the enabler for Stems on the DJ devices.
P.S. I had a mess around with them on Serato this week, loved the echo out Acapella but in honesty the sound quality on a track like Love TKO was really bad, yeah it’ll probably sound better on some auto tune dance music singer, but Teddy P was pushing it way past its limit.
@STU-C was that a good quality file of Love TKO (i.e. not lossy)? I’ve not tried that one myself.
I can’t remember the timeline for the 4+ stems debacle. Was the 4+ for sale before Denon made the stems announcement, or did they announce first?
It does seem to have backfired certainly, with people expecting the 4+ to have stems out of the box (we’ve seen evidence of that here) and apparently some buying it just to get stems, not bothered about actually beta testing.
The big difference with the Akai equipment is that the stems don’t seem to be rendered in real time on the one hand, and work on short samples on the other. The longer the track, the greater the computing power required, both in terms of RAM and CPU. If you look closely at the video on Akai stems, there’s a pre-calculation stage that takes some time, even though the sample is relatively short. 8 or 16 beats, perhaps. And apparently there’s nothing you can do but wait during this calculation stage until the separation is ready.
The expected operation of stems on DJ equipment is different. Stems should be calculated when the track is loaded, whatever its duration. Whether it’s 2m40 or 7 minutes long, without blocking the use of the equipment or various other actions during this time.
On your second point, you should also know that currently there are many remixers/producers who already use stems extracted from other applications to create their tracks. And if the source stems they used are not of high quality and already have audio artifacts, it will be even worse when you then go under serato to separate the stems again.
I cant remember the exact timeline but the Stems feature was leaked so they had to do something to counter the leak, which was release that Alpha version to some Youtube channels and then add it as a Beta feature to the device when it came out.
From memory when the prime 4+ was released, many YouTube influencers presented prime 4+ as a product that should have stems as an exclusive feature. Like the first stand alone in the world which will have this function. This most certainly prompted the purchase of many people who were waiting for stems on standalone and bought a prime4+. Even if in most cases the reviews specified that it was a beta version.
I remember when the Prime 4 was first announced and there were a few stores in the UK that published the stems feature as part of the announcement blurb. Many published the same thing at the same time so it looks more like someone at inMusic accidentally left it in the marketing that went out. Someone there probably had their Chunky Monkey ice cream (Hot Fuzz style).
I remember a few stores editing their listings by removing the paragraph that listed stems as a feature but a some didn’t. I can imagine a few sweaty people frantically asking stores to retract it but by that time the horse had already bolted. The genie was out of the bottle and the internet did its thing.
They had to come clean and they gave an early demo to Mojaxx, CT & Phil Morse to play with.
Personally I think they don’t need the feedback. I guess It’s a token gesture beta release to pacify the people who bought it when they spotted it can do stems. As PK said, we’ll most probably see a more polished product at some point when the roadmap aligns when their original announcement was due.
Personally I don’t care about / need Stems either. The overall idea is great, but for me it is a technologiy which screams “Go all or nothing”: Offer proper threefold separation and make it sound really good. Or skip it alltogether.
But Engine only has twofold separation and it sounds poor, every reviewer emphasizes that. I dunno if it was a good idea to bring Steams on standalone units with such comparably weak specs at all, considering it even challenges mid- to high-tier laptops CPUs. And if you really want to take the challenge, which is cool, then I would have waited with the public release and announcement at such an early dev stage. It all seemed a bit rushed in 2023. But fingers crossed they can still make it sound great.
many YouTube influencers presented prime 4+ as a product that should have stems as an exclusive feature.
Denon is always in time to offer a pre-analysis to be carried out on Engine DJ, the hardware is absolutely adequate to manage the files already analyzed.
The Rane Four has a unique function, stem split, no other Serato controller offers this function, it was a RANE idea, easily replicable on the PRIME series products.
I apologize for my English, maybe I didn’t make myself understood, I know very well that the Rane Four is just a controller that runs the Stems analyzed by Serato.
Let me explain better, in my first post I hope they add the ability to split STEMS tracks into the PRIME DJ analysis software, these pre-analyzed tracks would be easily manageable by the PRIME hardware, and since PRIME players are DUAL LAYER, also add the STEM SPLIT function, a function that cannot be replicated in competing Pio players.
I’m sure there have been previous discussions here about having the desktop software process the tracks then package them up into a file that the Prime players can recognise & play back as separated parts.
It’s a viable idea, but obviously not as convenient as being able to perform separation on the fly using the Prime hardware.
But that would remove any proprietary advantage of using an off-line licensed separation algorithm, because you could use the file on other hardware. So don’t expect interoperability. Expect market fragmentation! Yea!
I would assume your someone who’s been djing awhile and is against anything that is different from when you started. That’s fine I’m with you. Learn how to EQ instead of stems.
Where your missing the mark though is the next generation of djs. They’ll likely never know how to DJ without stems. Hell AI may even just make their mixes for them. There’s already softwares offering that
