Important
macOS first launch (no code signing yet). After dragging StemDeck to Applications, clear the Gatekeeper quarantine flag or macOS will say the app is damaged:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/StemDeck.app
Optional: start from a clean slate. To reproduce a true first-run experience, open each path in Finder via the Go menu, then Go to Folder (Shift+Cmd+G), and move the folders to Trash:
~/Library/Application Support/StemDeck~/Library/WebKit/app.stemdeck.desktop~/Library/Caches/stemdeck~/Library/Caches/app.stemdeck.desktop
You can also delete ~/Library/Preferences/app.stemdeck.desktop.plist the same way. This is optional; the app will work without it.
What's new in 0.13.0
StemDeck now speaks seven languages, and the desktop app no longer forces a FFmpeg download on macOS/Windows when a working one is already on your system.
StemDeck is still alpha. A leading 0. means no stability promise.
Seven languages
- General Settings now has a Language selector: a dropdown with each language's flag and native name. Choice is saved locally and applies immediately, no restart needed.
- Supported languages: English, Polski, 日本語, 简体中文, Deutsch, Português, Bahasa Indonesia.
- Every screen is covered: the main studio view, the mixer, the beat grid editor, the click track, all Settings tabs, notifications, and every dialog.
- Plural forms are handled correctly per language (including Polish's three-way one/few/many split), not just a generic "add an s".
- Translations went through a dedicated native-speaker review pass on top of the initial pass, catching real mistranslations and grammar mistakes rather than just missing strings.
FFmpeg: prefer what you already have
- If a working FFmpeg is already on your system (Homebrew, apt, choco, or a dev install), StemDeck now uses it directly on macOS, Windows, and Linux, instead of always downloading its own. This was already true for Linux; it now applies everywhere.
- "Working" means more than just launching: StemDeck checks that the binary runs on your OS and has every encoder its export pipeline needs (MP3, FLAC, OGG, AAC), so a broken or stripped-down system build isn't silently accepted only to fail later during an export.
- Fixes a real bug on macOS: a downloaded FFmpeg build compiled against a newer macOS could fail outright on an older one, even though a perfectly good system FFmpeg was sitting right there unused (#414).
- Docker is unaffected: it installs FFmpeg via
aptin the image and never goes through this download path.
Notes on the beat detection model
Unchanged, repeated here for anyone upgrading from an older release:
- The first time you use the click track, StemDeck downloads a 77 MB beat-detection model (MIT licensed, code and weights). It is cached alongside the Demucs models, so this happens once.
- If that download is unavailable, for example on a machine with no internet, detection falls back to the classic librosa tracker automatically. The click still works; it is just more likely to pick half or double tempo on fast material, which
/2andx2correct. - Known limitation: tracks whose time signature changes bar to bar, such as odd-time progressive material, get a usable steady pulse but the bar accents will not follow the written meter. No current beat tracker handles that automatically. The grid editor is the way to fix it by hand.
- Tracks with no drums fall back to detecting on the full mix and are less reliable.