stemdeckapp/stemdeck v0.8.0-alpha.16

0.8.0 Alpha 16

on GitHub

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/StemDeck.app

What's new in 0.8.0 Alpha 16

Click track

• Play along to a click that follows the song. Every separated track now gets its own beat grid, detected from the isolated drums stem across the whole song, and the click plays those beat times. Because it follows the detected beats rather than a fixed BPM, it tracks songs that speed up or drift instead of sliding out of phase. Press K or use the Experimental button above the transport. (#334)
• Accents follow the real bar lines. Downbeats are detected, so the accent lands on beat 1 of the actual bar rather than counting four from the start of the file. You can override it with a fixed 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 or 6/8, or turn accents off. (#334)
• Half and double time in one click. Choosing which pulse counts as "the beat" is genuinely ambiguous on slow ballads, sparse grooves and compound meter, and no detector gets it right every time. If the click feels half or double speed, /2 and x2 fix it instantly. (#334)
• Volume, and the click rides the master fader like the stems do.

Beat grid editor

• Correct the grid when detection gets it wrong. Press G to draw the beat grid over the waveform and edit it. (#334)
• Drag one beat to retime a whole region. Beats between your anchors re-interpolate, so a tempo section takes one gesture rather than one drag per beat. Hold Alt to move a single beat instead.
• Add and delete beats, and mark bar lines with a per-region beats-per-bar, for songs whose meter changes.
• Dragging snaps to the actual drum transients, with undo/redo (Cmd/Ctrl+Z) and autosave. Your edits are stored separately from the detected grid, so re-analysing a track never discards them.

Click in exports

• Optionally bake the click into an export. A new "Include click track" checkbox in the export panel. It is off by default, because a permanent click in a bounce you meant to be clean is not obvious until you play it back. (#334)
• Works for every format, WAV, MP3, FLAC, OGG and the MP4 video export, and honours your current rate and accent settings.

Settings: Logs

• A new Logs tab showing where StemDeck writes its logs on this machine, with each file's size and what produces it. (#334)
• Read the last hour of the application log or the setup log without leaving the app, read-only, with a Refresh button.
• Export logs in Settings > General bundles every log file into one zip, which is the thing to attach to a bug report.

Notes on the beat detection model

• 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 /2 and x2 correct.
• 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.

Installing

• macOS: drop the .app into Applications and launch (run the xattr command above first).
• Windows: unzip the downloaded .zip, then run StemDeck.exe from the extracted folder. For GPU acceleration, use the NVIDIA zip and make sure nvidia-smi reports your GPU; the CPU zip runs anywhere.
• Linux: download the .tar.gz for your hardware, extract it, and run ./StemDeck. Install the WebKitGTK + GTK runtime prerequisites first (FFmpeg is fetched automatically on first launch):

  sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 libgtk-3-0
  

  The NVIDIA build additionally needs a working NVIDIA driver such that nvidia-smi reports your GPU. You do not need to install the CUDA toolkit; StemDeck downloads the CUDA runtime it needs on first launch (a one-time download of roughly 2.5 GB). If you have no NVIDIA GPU, use the CPU-only tarball.
• Docker / Unraid: install "StemDeck" from Unraid Community Applications, or pull ghcr.io/stemdeckapp/stemdeck:edge and map port 8000 plus the /app/jobs and /cache volumes. Add --runtime=nvidia for GPU acceleration. See the README for the full docker run command.