There's been a lot of talk around here about stems and upmixing lately, and that's all good. The SurroundByUs guys started it all and their SPEC program has been a trail blazer in the field, and is still today one of the top choices for folks who like to upmix stuff to quad, 5.1 and beyond. There are also many new comers like Penteo (which isn't really that new, it's founder, John Wheeler was/is a member here from way back when), spleeter, Acoustica 7, and the newest version of Acid Pro are other programs that can extract stems.
SpectraLayers has been around for many years, first as a Sony product, then a MAGIX program, and now it's owned by Steinberg. All along it's been a powerful spectral editor but it has a very steep learning curve and unless you do this kind of thing for real, like a job, most hobby guys don't have the time or patience to really get into it and learn it. Those that do, well, more power to them.
This week I got an offer to upgrade my copy of the software to Version 7 for $79, so I checked it out and saw that it too now had a stem separation feature, so I decided to go for it. I had used the program in the past to tweak up some audio on some conversions I'd done so I knew the deal. It's fairly sophisticated and I know I will never be an expert or even good at it, but I like to play around with this stuff.
The first thing I noticed is that it opens a 5.1 file, for real! It also supported playback in 5.1 on my PC, so that was very cool to see and hear. You can see the setup here:
Once you have a 5.1 file in the editor, you can solo or mute individual channels with the "Channels" control panel, as circled below.
So, anyway, back to the stem extraction. It works very much like Acoustica 7 or other Spleeter implementations, although I do not know if this is based on Spleeter or not. I would guess that it is not. You select LAYER from the main menu at the top of the window, and then UNMIX STEMS. You then get the pop up window shown below:
Once you select which stems you want to extract, you just press OK and the PC/Software does the rest. My desktop tower is fairly powerful, and it did not take but a minute or two to extract the stems from the Al Stewart song "Song on the Radio", as shown here:
What's cool is, as you can see from the jpg above, is that each stem is shown in the spectral picture of the wav file in a different color, as indicated in the LAYERS box in the lower left of the above jpg. You can use the MUTE or SOLO buttons to add or remove what's displayed in the spectragraph.
SpectraLayers has been around for many years, first as a Sony product, then a MAGIX program, and now it's owned by Steinberg. All along it's been a powerful spectral editor but it has a very steep learning curve and unless you do this kind of thing for real, like a job, most hobby guys don't have the time or patience to really get into it and learn it. Those that do, well, more power to them.
This week I got an offer to upgrade my copy of the software to Version 7 for $79, so I checked it out and saw that it too now had a stem separation feature, so I decided to go for it. I had used the program in the past to tweak up some audio on some conversions I'd done so I knew the deal. It's fairly sophisticated and I know I will never be an expert or even good at it, but I like to play around with this stuff.
The first thing I noticed is that it opens a 5.1 file, for real! It also supported playback in 5.1 on my PC, so that was very cool to see and hear. You can see the setup here:
Once you have a 5.1 file in the editor, you can solo or mute individual channels with the "Channels" control panel, as circled below.
So, anyway, back to the stem extraction. It works very much like Acoustica 7 or other Spleeter implementations, although I do not know if this is based on Spleeter or not. I would guess that it is not. You select LAYER from the main menu at the top of the window, and then UNMIX STEMS. You then get the pop up window shown below:
Once you select which stems you want to extract, you just press OK and the PC/Software does the rest. My desktop tower is fairly powerful, and it did not take but a minute or two to extract the stems from the Al Stewart song "Song on the Radio", as shown here:
What's cool is, as you can see from the jpg above, is that each stem is shown in the spectral picture of the wav file in a different color, as indicated in the LAYERS box in the lower left of the above jpg. You can use the MUTE or SOLO buttons to add or remove what's displayed in the spectragraph.
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