ahhh I did not realise you are doing the real-time stem separation! Just wondering, if you work a lot with the same tracks, do you still do it real-time or pre-record separate stems? The latter option probably saves some resources!
ah, no, sorry for the confusion - my apologies
i'm not doing real time stem seperation at the same time i'm trying to trying to do other stuff.
if i think i'm going to use stems on a track, i first generate the stems which basically means I don't plan on doing anything else on the laptop while the stems are being generated (I'm going to guess an average of 10 or 15 minutes) because the laptop will slow to complete crawl at that point.
Then a stems file is created for the track in whichever folder the track is in, and it seems it will generally be a bit larger than the original wav or flac file.
After I generate the stems file, I shut down vdj and restart it again because it gets glitchy at that point.
Now when I restart vdj and load the track in one of the decks, you can see how it looks different with a segmented line underneath the track.
If you click on one of the five basic stem buttons (vocals, instrument/melody, bass, kick, hihat) for that track, you will notice how the waveform looks different when you tell it to take out or add back one of the five basic stems.
I think when talking about using the kind of stems virtualdj generates, it probably causes confusion because it's not like they've generated five different wav files for each of the five stems, but some kind of single file called .vdjstems
It's resource intensive because you're basically running a file that is like running five stems at once in a single deck, and with the ability to mute/unmute different stems within that single file, add different effects to different stems, control the volume of each stem - again all stuff in a single file loaded in a single deck.
VDJ even says on their website that it's not for slow computers.
Although it did just occur to me that one way around that is to then generate my own separate stems wav files by recording each one by itself by muting the other four stems.
but then that could cause other workflow issues, depending on the situation
here is a screenshot of an example of some of the different things you can have running at once with just two tracks loaded (and even then you could be running infinitely more things) - and this is just running a two deck version - imagine running four decks with stems for all four tracks and lots of other processes running at the same time.
The blue track on the left with the segmented bar underneath the waveform is a track that has stems file generated for it.
I've muted the "vocal" and "instrument" stem so you kind of see stuff greyed out in the background in the blue waveform of deck 1 at the top.
also did a totally improv short video with no plan to sort of show vdj integrated with my pioneer mixer/usb cdj decks
there's a lot of things I can control more hand-ons with the mixer like stems, samples (or sample loops), some of the fx while looking back-and-forth at the laptop if I feel like I'm losing track of what I'm doing.
on this video example, besides doing nonsensical stuff with various effects along with other unplanned or offbeat nonsense, i'm triggering or turning of iranian drum loops on the right deck and stems on the other - of course i can continually cycle through what the pads are doing/triggerining if i want to lose my mind
I should have talked through the video, but I feel like my mental disabilities also cause me to sound like a drunken imbecile pronouncing words in weird ways like accenting the wrong syllables and drawing out syllables, etc.
it took me years or decades to say words like dwarf or iron correctly! or to realize that crayon wasn't pronounced the same way as crown
