Install and first launch

StemDeck is a Mac app. Install it from the Mac App Store like any other app: search for StemDeck44, click Get, and let macOS download and install it. The app itself is free to download; performing requires a StemDeck Pro subscription with a 7-day free trial (see Subscription and account in Part 10).

Quick Start: your first song

This walkthrough takes a folder of stem files and turns it into a playable StemDeck song. Once you have done it a couple of times it takes under a minute.

Step 1: bring the folder in

You have two equivalent ways to do this:

1. Choose File → Import Folder… (⇧⌘N) and pick the song folder in the panel that opens.
2. Or just drag the song folder from Finder and drop it onto the library sidebar.

Either way, an import sheet appears showing what StemDeck found inside, and a “How to import” choice: Copy, Move, or Reference in place. Copy leaves your original folder untouched and duplicates the stems into your library, which is the safe default if the folder lives somewhere else on your Mac. Move relocates the folder into your library outright. Reference in place only applies if the folder is already inside your library.

Click the Import button and the song appears in your library, already built.

Step 2: see what happened automatically

Open the song and look at the stem mixer. Without you touching a single setting:

• Each stem got a display name with the song-name prefix stripped off. Neon Moon - DRUMS.wav shows up simply as DRUMS.
• Each stem got a color based on what it is: drums are orange, bass is blue, a click or count/guide stem gets its own tint.
• Each stem got routed to an output channel by matching words in its filename against the routing rules in Settings → Channels. A file with “drum” in its name goes to output 3, “bass” to output 4, and so on. The full default table is in How a stem gets its output in Part 7.

If one of your files does not match any rule, for example a stem named “Piano Fill” with no recognizable keyword, StemDeck does not just guess. It opens “Choose outputs for new stems” and asks you to pick an output for that stem before you go further. Anything you leave blank plays on output 1, the click output, and is flagged with a warning triangle next to the song in the sidebar so you notice before a show, not during one.

Quick Start: your first show

Run through this before you open the set, every time.

1. Check the device. Settings → Audio shows the device StemDeck is using. Confirm it is the interface actually connected, not System Default left over from rehearsal at home.

2. Check the outputs. Open a song and glance down the stem mixer’s OUT numbers. Any stem with an amber-tinted OUT widget fell back to output 1 because nothing routed it. Fix that before downbeat, not after.

3. MUTE ALL is off. The MASTER strip has one big stage-sized button. While engaged it reads “MUTED”. Make sure it does not.

4. MASTER at 0 dB. Double-click the MASTER fader to snap it back to unity if it has drifted.

5. GO to start the first song. Press the GO button, or just hit Space. Both do the same thing: load the selected song from the top and start it, arming the click lead-in if one is set.

6. When a song ends, the next one loads and waits. If you are running a setlist, the moment one song finishes, the next one is already loaded and sitting at 0:00, waveform visible, ready. It does not start on its own. Press GO or Space again when you are ready.

7. Stop rewinds. Pause holds. The Stop button always returns the playhead to 0:00. The Play/Pause button, when it is showing pause, holds exactly where you are, for the moment the singer needs a beat to catch a breath between songs without losing the place.

The Welcome Tour

The tour is seven steps. Each one anchors a bubble to the part of the window it is describing. Click Next to move on, or Skip Tour to leave at any point. Replay it any time from Help → Show Welcome Tour (⇧⌘?).

1. Your Library. Songs and setlists live in the sidebar. Click a song to load it; drag the divider to resize the column.

2. Waveform. Click anywhere to seek, scroll or pinch to zoom, and use Align Beat Grid to mark downbeats and Set Start / Set End to define a loop region.

3. Transport. Play, stop, rewind, pitch, tempo, tap tempo, and guide-vocal recording all live in this one row.

4. GO / LOOP. GO is the big play button (the spacebar works too). LOOP plays the vamp region you set on the waveform, and only lights up once Start and End are placed.

5. Stem Mixer. One channel strip per stem. Faders run from silence up to +12 dB. M mutes, S solos. Click the OUT number to route a stem to a different output.

6. Add Stems, Auto-Routed. Drag audio files here, or click to pick them. Filenames containing words like “click,” “drum,” “bass,” or “vocal” are auto-routed to their default output channel, the same auto-routing you just saw happen in Quick Start: your first song. Tweak the patterns in Settings → Channels.

7. Master + Export. The MASTER fader controls the whole mix. Right-click it for Export Mix, which bounces the song, click and lead-in included, to a file your bandmates can rehearse against.

Joining the mailing list

After the tour, StemDeck asks once whether you want to join the StemDeck mailing list. It is entirely optional, and nothing in the app changes if you say no. Members get practical tips for using StemDeck on stage, early access to beta builds, and a vote on what gets built next, at most about one email a month.

To join, type your email address and click Join, then open the confirmation email and click Confirm subscription. You are not added until you confirm. Click Not Now and the invitation never comes back on its own.

StemDeck never shows the invitation while a song is playing or on top of another prompt. You can join later, or again after unsubscribing, from Help → Join the StemDeck Mailing List…. Every email has a one-click Unsubscribe link. StemDeck itself does not store your address; see the privacy policy at www.stemdeck44.com/privacy.

How StemDeck thinks about audio

A few decisions run through the whole app. Understanding them now will save you confusion later, when you are wondering why something works the way it does.

Songs, stems, and setlists

A song is a folder in your library, holding one or more stems (the individual audio files: drums, bass, vocal, click, and so on) plus the song’s own settings: its downbeat, its BPM, its output routing, its markers. Everything about how a song plays lives with that song, in that folder.

A setlist is an ordered list of songs, nothing more. The same song can sit in several setlists at once, or in none, and can be reordered within one setlist without affecting any other. Building setlists and moving songs between them is covered in Part 6.

Song time and file time

Every stem file may have a bit of room tone, count-in, or silence before the music actually starts. StemDeck deals with this by drawing a line between two different clocks.

File time is the raw offset inside the audio file itself, starting at the first sample of the file. Song time is what you see everywhere in the app: the transport clock, the seek bar, the waveform. Song time 0:00 is wherever you tell StemDeck the song actually begins.

You set that point with Song Start, in the Align Beat Grid popover (Part 4). Mark it once, at the first note or the first beat of the count-in you want the band to hear, and every display in the app, the transport clock, the seek bar, the waveform, lines up to that point as 0:00. The audio before it is still there on disk; it is simply skipped when the song plays.

Beat alignment and BPM

StemDeck can take a song’s tempo from the folder name or from a number you type, but the precise way is to compute it from two marks you place on the waveform.

Downbeat 1 (DB1) is the anchor: any clear downbeat, marked once, that becomes the reference point for the whole song’s beat grid. Downbeat 2 (DB2) is a second reference, always marked exactly two measures after DB1.

From those two points, StemDeck’s BPM calculator infers how many whole measures fall between DB1 and DB2 on its own. You never type a measure count. It uses your current tempo estimate to guess the measure count, checks that the guess is close enough to be trustworthy, and either offers you a precise BPM (“Set BPM to 127.34”) or tells you plainly that it could not resolve one (“Doesn’t add up — move DB2 closer, recompute, repeat.”), so you never end up with a grid that silently drifts.

This two-point method beats the alternatives for a reason worth knowing. Tap tempo, tapping along by hand, is accurate to about ±1 BPM over a short sample: fine for a rough estimate, not tight enough to keep a beat grid locked over a four-minute song. A published BPM for a song is often rounded to the nearest whole number, when the real tempo is something like 127.3. Two clean downbeats, marked on the beat, give you the song’s real tempo instead of somebody’s rounded guess.

Stereo and multichannel

Whether StemDeck sends each stem to its own output channel or folds everything into one stereo mix depends entirely on the audio device you selected in Settings → Audio. A device with more than two output channels gets full per-stem routing: drums to one channel, click to another, and so on. A device with two channels, or the built-in System Default, plays everything as a single stereo mix, and the OUT numbers on your stem cards are simply ignored (they stay visible so nothing looks broken, they just do not do anything on that device).

The practical upshot: what your OUT numbers mean depends on what is plugged in. The full routing rules, the default output table, and how to wire up a multi-channel interface live in Part 7, Routing and Outputs.

Your library folder and this Mac’s settings

StemDeck splits what it remembers into two very different places, and it matters which is which if you ever move to a second Mac or a new laptop.

Inside your library folder, and so portable with it: every song’s folder and stems, its downbeat and BPM, its tempo map, its guide cues, its setlists, and any manual output you have pinned by hand on a stem card. Copy or sync the library folder to another Mac and all of this comes along.

On this Mac only, and not part of the library: which audio device StemDeck should use, the filename routing rules in Settings → Channels, MIDI mappings, the remote-control setup, and the master fader level. None of this travels with the folder. Move your library to a second laptop and you will need to redo the device selection and, if you have customized them, the routing rules, on that machine too.

The library folder

Every song you own lives in one folder on disk called your library folder. By default that’s ~/Music/StemDeck/, but you can point StemDeck at a different folder if you’d rather keep it somewhere else.

Inside the library folder, each song gets its own folder, and the stem files for that song sit right inside it. Next to the stems is a hidden file called .stemdeck.json. That file is how StemDeck remembers everything about the song: its stems, its downbeats, its tempo, its guide cues, its faders. StemDeck writes and reads that file for you. Never open it and edit it by hand: a typo there can make the song unreadable.

Setlists live in the same library folder, in a setlists subfolder, one file per setlist.

Settings → Library is where you manage the folder itself:

• The path row shows where your library currently lives.
• Change… picks a different folder.
• Reveal in Finder opens the folder so you can look inside.
• Rescan re-reads every folder in the library and rebuilds your song list and setlists from what’s actually on disk.
• A caption below the buttons shows how many songs StemDeck currently sees.

You can add a song the simple way, without going through any StemDeck import screen at all: drag a folder of stems into your library folder in Finder, then choose Rescan in Settings, or File → Rescan Library (⌘R). StemDeck notices the new folder, reads its files, and adds it to your song list.

Song folders and names

A song’s folder name can carry its tempo. Name a folder “Neon Moon (110)” and StemDeck reads 110 as the song’s starting BPM the moment it’s imported or rescanned. This is a convenience, not a requirement: a folder named anything else still imports fine, it just starts with no BPM set.

StemDeck understands several common shapes out of the box: “Name (110)”, “Name - 110”, “110 - Name”, “Name BPM(110)”, and “Name BPM: 110”, along with a looser fallback that just looks for a trailing number. The first pattern that matches wins. A number outside 60 to 300 is ignored, so a year in a folder name like “Christmas 2024” won’t be misread as a tempo.

You can see and edit these patterns yourself in Settings → Library, under Folder Name Patterns. Add your own with Add Pattern, and there’s a small test field where you can type a sample folder name and see exactly what StemDeck would detect: the song name and the BPM, or “no BPM detected” if nothing matched. Restore Defaults puts the built-in patterns back if you’ve changed them and want to start over.

Importing songs

There are several ways to get a song into your library, and they all end up in the same place: a folder inside your library, with its stems copied, moved, or referenced there.

File → Import Folder… (⇧⌘N) picks one folder of stems and shows you how it will come in. You choose Copy (leaves the original folder alone and copies the files into your library), Move (moves the folder into your library), or Reference in place (only available if the folder is already inside your library folder somewhere else).

File → New Song from Files… (⌘N) picks one or more loose audio files and always copies them into a brand new song folder. You’ll be asked to confirm the folder name before it’s created.

You can also drag and drop straight onto the library sidebar:

• Drop one folder, and you get the same Copy / Move / Reference choice as Import Folder….
• Drop several folders at once, and StemDeck treats it as a batch: one choice (Copy, Move, or Reference) applies to every folder, and it reports back what happened to each one.
• Drop loose files with no folder around them, and StemDeck copies them into a new song folder for you, the same as New Song from Files….

In a batch, a folder can be skipped rather than imported:

• If a folder is already a StemDeck song (it already has its own .stemdeck.json), StemDeck skips it rather than importing it again. Reimporting would throw away the downbeats, tempo map, and guide cues you’d already set for that song.
• If a folder has no audio files in it at all, StemDeck skips it too, rather than adding an empty song to your library.

Either way, the batch tells you afterward what it imported and what it skipped, and why.

If two songs would land on the same folder name, StemDeck adds “(2)” to keep them apart. That renamed folder usually no longer matches your BPM patterns, so check that song’s tempo after a batch import that reports a collision.

Drop something StemDeck can’t make sense of (a mix of folders and loose files together, say), and you’ll see an “Unsupported drop” message asking you to drop either a single folder of stems or one or more loose audio files, not both at once.

However a stem arrives, if its filename doesn’t match any of your output routing rules, StemDeck will ask you to choose an output for it rather than silently leaving it on output 1. See How a stem gets its output in Part 7 for the full picture.

Sharing songs: StemDeck packages

Songs and setlists can travel as single files. File → Export Song… and File → Export Setlist… bundle everything into one .stemdeck package you can email, AirDrop, or copy to a drive. File → Import Song or Setlist… brings one back in, and you can select several packages at once: importing more than one shows a single “Import Complete” summary when it’s done.

A package carries everything that makes a song sound and feel right: the stems themselves, downbeats and the tempo map, guide cues, fader settings, and any manual output assignments you’ve made by hand. Nothing about it is left out for you to redo.

This is also how you move songs between two laptops. You have two options:

• Export a package per song, or per setlist, and import it on the other Mac.
• Or copy your whole library folder across (an external drive, AirDrop, a shared network folder) and point the second Mac at it from Settings → Library → Change….

Either way, a few things are specific to each Mac and don’t travel with the song, so plan to set them up again on the second laptop: the audio device you’re outputting to, any routing rules you’ve customized in Settings → Channels, MIDI mappings, and remote control setup. Keep both laptops on StemDeck 1.6 or later if they’ll share a library folder: an older version doesn’t understand manual output assignments and will silently drop them the next time it saves.

Renaming and deleting songs

To rename a song, right-click it in the song list (the library or a setlist) and choose Rename…. This renames the song you clicked without loading it, so a song that is playing keeps playing while you rename another. You can also select a song and choose Song → Rename Song…, which renames the selected song. Either way, StemDeck renames the song’s folder on disk to match, but keeps any BPM text that was already part of the folder name: renaming “Neon Moon (110)” to “Neon Moon Reprise” gives you “Neon Moon Reprise (110)”, not a folder that’s lost its tempo.

A rename is refused if the new name would create a folder StemDeck can’t safely use: names containing a slash, a name that starts with a dot, one that ends in a space or a dot, or one that’s simply too long. You’ll see why it was refused rather than have it silently altered.

Deleting a song is done from the sidebar, not a menu: right-click the song and choose Move to Trash…. StemDeck confirms first, then moves the song’s whole folder, stems and all, to the macOS Trash. It’s recoverable there in Finder exactly like any other deleted file, until you empty the Trash. If a song has no folder on disk to begin with, the same context menu instead offers Remove from Library…, which just takes it off your song list without touching any files. And if the song’s folder happens to be on a drive that doesn’t support the Trash at all, StemDeck offers a Delete Permanently… fallback instead, clearly marked as unrecoverable.

Removing a single stem from a song (right-click a stem card → Remove Stem) only takes it off that song; the audio file itself is not deleted.

Snapshots and recovery

A snapshot is a save point for your song information: markers, tempo, cue maps, faders, and setlists. A snapshot never holds audio. It’s there to protect the decisions you’ve made about a song, not the files themselves.

StemDeck takes one automatically every time it launches, and again before any change that touches a lot of songs at once, so an accidental bulk action is never the last word. You can also take one on purpose before a gig: File → Save Snapshot (⇧⌘S).

Settings → Snapshots lists them all, newest first, with a date and a short description of what each one covers. From here:

• Take Snapshot Now grabs one on demand.
• Restore… on any row shows you what would change before anything happens. Your current state is snapshotted first, so restoring an older snapshot never costs you the ability to come back.
• Show in Finder reveals the raw snapshot files if you ever need them outside the app.

Older snapshots are pruned automatically so the list doesn’t grow forever.

Backing up your library

Library → Back Up Library… copies your library, audio and all, into a backup location you choose. It’s the backup that snapshots are not.

Each library you use has its own backup location. That’s handy if you keep a separate library per band or per project: each one keeps its own backups, in its own place, and doesn’t crowd the others.

When the library is moved or unavailable

If StemDeck can’t find your library folder exactly where it left it, or can’t read it at all, it stops and asks you before doing anything. Nothing is ever deleted or changed until you make a choice.

“Your library folder has changed” appears when StemDeck finds a different folder than the one it used last time (you renamed or moved it, say). It shows you both: Last used and Found, each with a song count so you can tell them apart. Four buttons: Quit StemDeck if you want to sort it out first, Choose Another… to pick a third folder entirely, Use Folder at Old Path… to point back at the original location, or Use Found Folder to accept the one StemDeck found. Nothing happens until you pick one.

“Library unavailable” appears if the folder can’t be reached or read at all. Your choices are Quit StemDeck, Choose Another…, or Retry. You may also see Use as Empty Library…, offered only when the folder exists but genuinely has no songs in it yet; be careful with that one; it’s meant for a truly fresh start, and StemDeck takes a snapshot before it lets you proceed, but it’s not the button to reach for if you were expecting your existing songs to be there.

If your library is a network drive or an external disk that goes offline mid-show, you don’t lose your place. An amber caption appears under the setlist header reading “Library offline: changes are kept”, with a small Reconnect button. StemDeck keeps working from what it already loaded; your edits are held and written back once the folder is reachable again. You can also trigger the same check any time from Library → Reconnect Library.

Housekeeping commands

A few Library-menu commands clean up small things. Each one takes a snapshot first.

Stems stored outside your library are copied in automatically. Every stem you add is copied into its song’s folder, and older songs from before version 1.6 whose stems still point somewhere else (a Downloads folder, a cloud drive) are fixed at startup: StemDeck copies those files into the song’s folder in the background, never while you’re playing, and the song switches to the copy once it’s verified. Your original files are never moved or deleted. A notice tells you what was copied. If a file can’t be copied right now (a cloud file that isn’t downloaded, a drive that’s unplugged), the song keeps playing from where it is, the notice names it, and StemDeck tries again at the next launch. Library → Copy Outside Stems Into Library… runs the same pass on demand.

Library → Repair Stem File Names… renames any stem file that’s stuck with an internal, unreadable filename back to something based on its actual name, so it’s easy to recognize in Finder.

Library → Keep Hand-Set Outputs as Manual… takes output channels you set by hand in an older version of StemDeck and saves them properly as manual outputs, so they travel with the song from now on.

Adding stems to a song

A song is only useful once it has stems in it. With a song selected, look at the end of the stem row: there is an Add Files card. Click it to open a file picker, or just drag audio files from Finder and drop them anywhere on the stem row.

StemDeck accepts WAV, AIFF, and MP3 files. Drop in as many as you like at once: a full multitrack session, a single replacement stem, or one new backing vocal.

When a stem lands, StemDeck does several things for you automatically:

• Output channel. The filename is checked against the routing rules in Settings → Channels and the stem is routed to the matching output. If nothing matches, it lands on output 1 and is flagged so you notice before the show, not during it. See Setting an output by hand (the pin) in Part 7.
• Color. Click and metronome stems are tagged cyan, count and guide stems indigo, drum stems orange, and bass stems blue. Anything else is left uncolored until you set a color yourself.
• Order. New stems fall into a sensible default order: click or metronome first, then count or guide, then drums, then bass, then keys, then guitar, then vocals. You can always drag a card to a different spot in the row.
• Display name. If the file is named with the song title as a prefix, for example “Beer Money - DRUMS.wav” in a song called “Beer Money”, the card shows just “DRUMS.” The file on disk keeps its full name.

If a dropped stem does not match any routing rule, StemDeck asks you to choose an output before it lands on the click bus by accident. This Assign Outputs prompt lists the unmatched stem, offers an output field, and lets you pick Not Now to defer or Assign to lock it in. The full routing story, including how to change the rules that drive this in the first place, is in Part 7, Routing and Outputs.

Stem cards

Each stem gets one card in the mixer row. Reading top to bottom: a thin color stripe across the top, the stem’s name, an OUT field with its pin, a vertical fader with its meter built in, and a row of M and S buttons for mute and solo.

The OUT field shows the current output as a number, with up and down arrows beside it. A pin glyph sits next to the number: filled amber means you set this output by hand and it is saved with the song; hollow gray means the output is still coming from the routing rules on this Mac. Click a filled pin to hand the stem back to the rules. Full detail on manual outputs is in Part 7.

Drag a card left or right in the row to reorder the stems. There is no separate “reorder” mode: just pick up the card and drop it where you want it.

Right-click menu

Right-click any stem card for its full set of actions:

• Rename… changes the display name only. The file on disk is untouched.
• Color opens a submenu of color tags.
• Mark as Click Track (or Unmark as Click Track) marks the stem as click-like, so it bypasses pitch shifting (it still follows tempo changes).
• Align… appears only on click-like stems, and opens a small popover for nudging that stem’s timing independently.
• Start Audio at Playhead delays this one stem so it begins at the current playhead position instead of song-time zero.
• Silence All Other Stems at Playhead is the fast way to isolate one stem for a moment: it stamps a start offset on every other stem at once.
• Clear All Start Offsets appears only when at least one stem has a start offset set, and resets them all.
• Clear Mute Regions (n) removes every muted span painted on that stem, where n is the number of regions currently on it.
• Keep OUT n as Manual and Use Routing Rule (OUT n) are the menu equivalents of clicking the pin: one locks the current output in, the other hands it back to the rules.
• Remove Stem asks “Remove stem ‘’ from this song? The audio file on disk is not deleted.” before taking the stem out of the song.

Stage Note Removing a stem never deletes the audio file. If you remove the wrong one before a show, drag it back in from Finder or Add Files.

Trimming silence: Song Start and Song End

Some source recordings have a few seconds of room tone, a count-in you did not ask for, or talk-back before the song actually starts. Song Start lets you skip past it without editing the audio.

Open Align Beat Grid: the flag button on the waveform toolbar, or Song → Align Beat Grid…. Step 1 is Song Start (optional). Scrub or play to the exact moment the music begins, then click Set to playhead. Everything before that point is skipped on playback; song-time zero moves to wherever you marked. Click Clear to put it back.

Right below Song Start, the same step has a Song End (optional) control, for the opposite problem: a long fade, a dead-air tail, or a false ending you never want to hear during a show. Play or scrub to where the song should stop, click Set to playhead, and StemDeck trims playback (and the exported mix) at that point. Clear removes it and the song plays to its natural end again.

Setting downbeats and computing BPM

Open the same Align Beat Grid popover: the flag button on the waveform toolbar, or Song → Align Beat Grid…. Steps 2 through 4 mark the beat grid and compute the song’s tempo.

Step 4: Compute BPM

Once both downbeats are marked, the button reads Set BPM to , for example “Set BPM to 127.34.” Click it to apply that tempo to the song. Below the button, a caption reports how it got there: “≈ N measures” on success.

If the caption reads “Doesn’t add up — move DB2 closer, recompute, repeat.” instead, Downbeat 2 isn’t two measures after Downbeat 1 (or one of the marks is off the beat). Re-mark Downbeat 2 exactly two measures after Downbeat 1 and try again.

Adding a click track and a lead-in

Open the Tempo & Time Signature popover: click the metronome button in the transport, or choose Song → Generate Click Track…. Set the BPM and Time sig fields first; the click generator needs both.

Under Click Track, Length sets how many measures of click to generate, in measures, defaulting to 32. Under Lead-In, Measures (0 to 8) sets how many measures the click plays alone before the rest of the stems join in. The caption beneath it tells you exactly what will happen:

• At 0 measures: “Click and stems start together.”
• With a click stem already present and a lead-in set: “Click plays N measure(s) before the rest of the stems start.”
• With no click stem yet and a lead-in requested: “Lead-in needs a click stem — generate one below.”

Click Generate Click Track (or Regenerate Click Track, if one already exists) to write the click. It’s saved into the song’s folder as a new stem, routed to output 1, colored cyan.

On stage, a configured lead-in means the click counts the band in before anything else sounds. Both GO and Rewind arm the lead-in, so pressing either one starts the count exactly where you’d expect. When you export a mix, the lead-in is included, since the band needs it to rehearse to the file the same way they’ll hear it live.

Mute regions

A mute region silences a span of audio without touching the file underneath it. This is the tool for dropping a backing vocal out of one verse, or killing a section your band plays live and doesn’t want doubled from the stems.

To paint one, hold Option and drag across the waveform where you want silence. A red overlay marks the muted span.

If you’re viewing a single stem, the region applies only to that stem. If you’re viewing the full mix, it applies to every stem except the click, count, and guide stems, so the band still hears its count-in even while the front-of-house mix goes quiet there.

To remove a region, right-click the waveform and use the Mute Regions section of the menu, which lists each region and lets you remove it individually or clear them all. You can also clear every mute region on a single stem from that stem’s card, via Clear Mute Regions (n) in its right-click menu.

The Timeline Editor

Some downloaded stem packs ship with less count-in than you want, say one measure where you’d rather have two. The Timeline Editor solves exactly this: it copies a piece of one stem’s audio and pastes it in at the front of the song, so every stem lines up on the beat you actually want to start on.

Open it from Song → Timeline Editor…. It shows a ruler across the top and one row per stem below it, all sharing the same time axis. Pan with a two-finger swipe, zoom by pinching or with the zoom buttons, and use Start or Fit to jump to the beginning or fit the whole song in view.

Downbeat 1 in the editor

Downbeat 1 is the same marker from the Align Beat Grid popover, just editable here too. Double-click the ruler to place it, drag the “1” chip to move it, or use the nudge buttons (−10 ms, −1 ms, +1 ms, +10 ms) for fine adjustment.

Copy Selection to Start

Click Copy Selection to Start. What happens next depends on how much room exists before Downbeat 1:

• If there’s room before the downbeat, the confirm panel says the song start simply moves forward. No stems shift, and any audio hidden before the new start is kept on disk but is no longer part of the song.
• If there isn’t enough room, the panel says every stem shifts to the right and silence is inserted at the front to make space.
• If your selection is an exact fit for the space available, the panel says so: nothing shifts, the count-in slots in cleanly.

Click Copy to Start to apply. New audio files are written into the song’s folder; the originals are left untouched on disk. The change takes effect the next time you play the song, not immediately.

What a guide track is

A guide track is a spoken cue track: a stem that says “Chorus 2 3 4,” “Intro,” “End 2 3 4,” and so on, timed to the song. It plays through the band’s ears (output 2 by default, alongside the count-in), not to the room, so nobody has to memorize the arrangement by heart. On a song with a long solo, a surprise breakdown, or an arrangement that changes night to night, it’s the difference between the band landing the next section together and someone coming in a bar early because they lost count.

The Guide Builder assembles a guide track from a library of spoken cues. You can also record your own voice into the guide stem instead, covered later in this chapter under “Recording your own cues.”

Before you start

The Guide Builder needs two things from the song: at least one stem, and a BPM, either typed in directly or computed from two downbeats in Align Beat Grid.

Downbeat 1 is not required to open the Guide Builder, but it is strongly recommended. Without it, cues can still be placed by eye and ear, but you lose the ability to snap a cue to the beat and the measured beat grid described later in this chapter.

Opening the Guide Builder

Choose Song → Guide Builder…. The window opens with a caption across the top: pick a cue, then drag it onto the timeline to line it up by eye and ear. Build bakes one guide stem; the rest of the song’s stems are left alone.

The window sizes itself to the screen it opens on. On a smaller display, the middle of the window (the header, transport, timeline, and inspector) scrolls up and down, while the action bar along the bottom, with Build, Cancel, and Clear Guide, stays pinned in view, so Build is never off the edge of the screen.

At the top right, a SONG BPM readout shows the tempo the builder is working at, next to the zoom controls: Zoom In, Zoom Out, Start (jump to the top of the song), and Fit (the whole song in view). Below that is a preview transport: Rewind, Play/Pause, and a forward jump button, with a running time readout, so you can audition the cues exactly as the band will hear them.

Two switches sit alongside the transport:

• Snap to beat, off by default. Turn it on and a cue you place or drag locks its start to the nearest beat instead of landing wherever you drop it. It needs Downbeat 1 and a BPM to work.
• Hear existing guide, shown only on a song that already has a built guide. Flip it to A/B: the preview plays the guide stem that is already built, instead of the cues you are currently placing, so you can compare the two.

The cue palette

The palette is organized in three rows, and every cue in it is recorded speech in one consistent voice (the cue library’s revision 3), either as a whole phrase or as single words assembled together. Whole phrases are complete recordings (“Chorus, two, three, four” said in one breath) stretched to match the song’s tempo, and are the ones you’ll reach for most. Single word cues (the violet row) are built by placing individual recorded words on their own beats, with silence in between, covering what whole phrases don’t: bare section names, short counts, and single beats.

The three rows:

1. Amber, the most-used cues: Intro, Verse, Chorus, Solo, Bridge, Tag, Outro, End (hit), End (count).
2. Cyan, the rest of the whole phrases: 1 2 3 4, Drums In, Pre Chorus, Chorus Solo, Verse Breakdown, Breakdown, Chorus Outro, Pickup, and the phrases added in revision 3: Intro Breakdown, Breakdown Chorus, Chorus Breakdown, Breakdown Pre Chorus, Breakdown Bridge, Breakdown Verse, Build, Verse Build, Outro Solo, and Drums In 2 3 4.
3. Violet, labeled SINGLE WORD CUES: the bare section names (Intro, Verse, Pre Chorus, Chorus, Chorus Solo, Solo, Bridge, Verse Breakdown, Breakdown, Chorus Outro, Tag, Outro), plus 1 2, 1 2 3, and single beats 1 through 8. Revision 3 adds Hold, Stop, Vamp, Interlude, Key Change, and A Cappella to this row. Key Change and A Cappella take two beats. Chorus Solo, Verse Breakdown, and Chorus Outro are also two beats here: the two words land on consecutive beats instead of being squeezed into one.

Notice End is two separate cues, not one: End (hit) is a single stab for a song that ends on one hard hit, and End (count) is a full “2 3 4” count for an ending the band plays out to.

Placing, moving, and deleting cues

Click any cue in the palette to drop it onto the timeline at the current playhead. From there:

• Drag a placed cue left or right to move it.
• Click a placed cue to select it and open the inspector below the timeline: CUE (its name), DETAIL (how many beats it takes and what it’s built from), and POSITION (where it lands in the song).
• Nudge the selected cue with the −10 ms, −1 ms, +1 ms, and +10 ms buttons for fine placement.
• Delete the selected cue with the trash button in the inspector.

With Snap to beat on, a placed or dragged cue locks to the nearest beat instead of sitting wherever you dropped it.

A beat grid measured from a stem

A metronome BPM is a good starting point, but a live take rarely holds it exactly. The BEAT GRID FROM A STEM section measures the real beat positions from an actual stem, so the grid and snapping follow where the band actually played, not just where a fixed BPM predicts.

Pick a stem to measure from (click, count/guide, or drums are good candidates; a bass stem generally isn’t, since low, sustained notes give the analyzer no clean attack to lock onto), then click Measure. Discard throws the measured grid away and returns to the constant-BPM grid.

The caption below the controls tells you what happened:

• Set Downbeat 1 + BPM first, if either is missing.
• Measuring…, while it works.
• Coverage 97% · 375 beats, a successful measurement, with how much of the song it could track.
• Coverage N% — too low, constant grid, when the stem didn’t give enough usable attacks and StemDeck fell back to the constant grid. A song whose tempo genuinely changes partway through (a slow intro, then the real tempo) also falls back to the constant grid: the measurement follows small drift, not a tempo change.
• Constant grid from BPM, if no measurement has been taken at all.

Build and re-Build

When your cues are placed the way you want them, click Build. StemDeck bakes everything into one new guide stem file inside the song’s folder; nothing else about the song changes. Because the new file is a guide file, it’s routed like any guide stem, output 2 by default, right alongside the count-in. When it finishes, you’ll see Guide stem built — takes effect on the next play.

If the song already has a built guide, clicking Build again asks you to confirm: Replace the existing guide? Confirming keeps the previous guide stem in the song folder, renamed with the date it was replaced, so you can recover it if you change your mind. While a guide exists, a locked Existing guide reference lane sits in the timeline for comparison, and a Clear Guide button removes it entirely.

Cue revisions

The cue recordings themselves get improved from time to time. Each song remembers which set it was built with, shown as Guide cues: rev N. The current set is rev3, a new library in which every cue shares one consistent voice and which adds the new cues listed under The cue palette. A song built on an older set keeps sounding exactly as it always has, so a guide you have already rehearsed to never changes unless you ask.

When a newer set is available for the song, an Upgrade to rev3 button appears next to the caption. Click it and StemDeck moves each placed cue so it is heard where you heard it before, even though the new recording starts its first syllable at a slightly different moment than the old one. It works that out from the recordings themselves, so the shift is exact for each cue rather than a rough nudge. When it finishes, a green line says Upgraded to rev3, cues shifted to stay where you hear them. Takes effect on the next Build. Beside it is a scrolling strip with each cue’s shift in milliseconds. Click Build afterward to bake the upgrade into a new guide stem.

Sometimes StemDeck cannot place a cue, and it tells you in amber text in that strip rather than guessing:

• “Cue: not in rev3” means the new library has no cue by that name. The cue stays where it is, and you will need to replace it by hand.
• “Cue: shift unknown, not moved” means StemDeck could not measure that cue’s old or new recording. The cue stays where it is. Listen to it against the song before you Build.

Checking a guide against its cue map

If a song has a built guide and a saved list of placed cues, you’ll see Guide built · N saved cue(s) and a Check Guide Against Cue Map button. This compares the audio in the built guide stem against what you last placed, and reports either Cue map matches the built guide., or a mismatch: most often the song’s BPM changed since the guide was built (rebuilding will re-time the cues), or a specific number of cues differ by some number of milliseconds. Show Differences shows the details, then choose Use Cues As Heard (adopt what the audio actually contains) or Keep Saved Map (leave your placements as they are).

If a guide was built on an older version of StemDeck and never saved a cue map, you’ll instead see a note that the map wasn’t saved, with a Reconstruct cue map… button to rebuild one from the audio. Some guides can’t be analyzed at all, most commonly a guide recorded by hand rather than built from the cue library: This guide looks recorded, not built.

Recording your own cues

Instead of, or alongside, the built-in cue library, you can record your own voice into the guide stem, using the Rec button on the main transport, not the Guide Builder window.

• Press Rec while stopped and it starts playback and recording together from the top of the song (with the click lead-in armed, if you’ve set one).
• Press Rec while playing and it punches in at the current playhead.
• Press Rec again while recording and it punches out, splicing that take into the song’s guide stem.

The sliders button in the transport row (right of the metronome button, left of LOOP) opens the Record Input popover: INPUT, CHANNEL (shown only when the device has more than one input), GAIN, and RECORDING OFFSET, a slider from −100 to 250 ms (double-click the readout to reset it to 0) that shifts the recording earlier to correct for latency your interface doesn’t report on its own.

Transport controls

The transport bar sits above the stem mixer and gives you the controls you touch most on stage: Rewind, Play/Pause, Stop, and Rec, plus the seek bar and the big time display.

• Rewind (cyan) sends the playhead back to 0:00. If the song is already playing, playback keeps going from the top. If it’s stopped or paused, it behaves like Stop.
• Play/Pause (green when it will play, amber while playing and showing Pause) starts or pauses the current song from wherever the playhead is. Pause holds position, it does not rewind.
• Stop (red) halts playback and rewinds the playhead to 0:00.
• Rec (red) arms a punch-in recording into the song’s guide stem. It’s covered in full in “Guide Builder”.

Above the buttons, the seek bar lets you drag the playhead to any point in the song, whether playing or stopped. Next to it, the big time display shows elapsed time over total duration and updates live as the song plays.

GO and LOOP

GO is the big button to the right of the transport row. Press it (or Space) and the song reloads from the very top and starts playing, lead-in and all, no matter where the playhead was left. This is the one button you should train the band to use to start every song: it always begins at zero.

LOOP repeats a region of the song for as long as you leave it on. It’s built for two real jobs: vamping under a speech or an announcement, and stretching a solo section for the band. LOOP only lights up once a loop region exists on the song.

Setting a loop region

On the waveform toolbar you’ll find Set Start, Set End, and Clear, alongside a Loop switch and a range label showing the region you’ve marked (for example, “0:12.500 → 0:34.100”).

1. Play or scrub to where you want the loop to begin, then click Set Start.
2. Play or scrub to where you want it to end, then click Set End.
3. The range label fills in and the LOOP button becomes available.
4. Flip the Loop switch, or click LOOP in the transport row, to arm it.

While armed, LOOP is solid cyan and playback wraps from the end point back to the start point over and over. Click LOOP again, or press Space, to disarm it. Space only disarms, it never arms a loop on its own. Once disarmed, playback simply continues past the end point toward the rest of the song, it doesn’t stop or jump anywhere.

Click Clear to remove the loop region entirely. LOOP is unavailable again until you mark a new Start and End.

Tip Two common uses: vamp a short instrumental bed under a spoken intro or between-song banter, or extend a guitar solo for a few extra bars if the crowd’s into it. Set the region ahead of time during soundcheck so it’s ready when you need it live.

Setlists

A setlist is an ordered subset of your library, built for one show or one set. The sidebar dropdown at the top of the song list switches between Library (your whole collection) and any setlist you’ve created.

The dropdown lists Library first, then each setlist by name, with a checkmark on whichever is active. Below that: New Setlist…, Rename…, and Delete… (the last two only appear once a setlist is selected). The setlist you were last viewing is remembered the next time you launch StemDeck.

Renaming a song from the list

Right-click a song, in the library or in a setlist, and choose Rename…. The song you clicked is renamed without being loaded, so a song that is playing keeps playing. See Part 3 for what a rename does to the folder.

Pitch and tempo

The PITCH and TEMPO pills sit in the top bar, next to the transport. Both apply to every stem in the song except click, count, and guide stems.

PITCH transposes the whole song up or down, in whole semitones, from −12 to +12. Click the + or − arrows to nudge it a semitone at a time, or double-click the value to reset it to 0.

TEMPO changes playback speed from 0.5× to 2.0×. If you’ve set an Original BPM for the song, the pill shows a BPM number instead of a percentage. Double-click the value to reset it to 100% (or the original BPM). Right-click the tempo pill for Tap Tempo…, Set Original BPM… (or Edit Original BPM… once one is set), and, when a BPM is set, Clear Original BPM.

Click, count, and guide stems bypass the PITCH transform, so a click track doesn’t get an odd tone when you move a song to a different key. They still follow TEMPO, so the click stays locked to the beat when you speed up or slow down the song.

Channel strips

Each stem gets its own channel strip in the mixer row, modeled on a live console’s input channel: a color tag, a name, an output control, a fader with a meter, and Mute/Solo.

Master

The MASTER strip on the right controls the whole mix at once. It uses the same fader law as a channel strip: marks at +12/+6/0/−6/−12/−24/−48, unity at three-quarters up, ⌥-drag for fine control, double-click to reset to unity.

Instead of a small mute toggle, MASTER has a stage-sized MUTE ALL button that reads MUTED while it’s active, a deliberate kill switch you can hit without hunting for a tiny control. The master meter next to the fader shows the level of the whole mix.

Right-click MASTER for Export Mix…, covered in “Mix Export”.

The waveform

The waveform above the transport shows the whole song at a glance, with the playhead, markers, and grid drawn on top of it.

• Click anywhere on the waveform to seek there.
• Scroll or pinch to zoom in and out.
• View → Zoom In Waveform (⌘=), Zoom Out Waveform (⌘−), and Fit Waveform (⌘0) do the same from the menu bar. The zoom controls and a Fit button also sit right on the waveform toolbar.

While the song plays, the view scrolls to keep the playhead in sight automatically, you don’t need to re-center it yourself.

What’s drawn on the waveform:

• Amber chips labeled “1” and “2” mark Downbeat 1 and Downbeat 2.
• Measure lines mark every downbeat, either from a measured grid (built in the Guide Builder) or a constant grid computed from BPM.
• Cyan vertical line is the playhead.
• Red regions mark any mute regions you’ve painted with ⌥-drag.
• The click stem, if you have one, can be drawn in red instead of its usual color: toggle it in Settings → Audio → Display.

The toolbar itself carries Set Start, Set End, Clear, Loop (covered above under “GO and LOOP”), and Align Beat Grid, which opens the downbeat and BPM popover described in “Setting downbeats and computing BPM.”

Level Song Volumes

Different songs in your library can end up at noticeably different loudness, even with every fader at unity, simply because the source stems were recorded or mixed differently. Level Song Volumes measures how loud each song really plays on every output and proposes one fader move per song and output, so each output sits at the same level in every song. The point: once your sound engineer sets the console channel for the click, the guide, the drums, the bass and so on, that setting stays right for the whole set. Reach it from Settings → Library or Library → Level Song Volumes….

In plain terms, here’s what it does:

• It scans every song and measures how loud each output actually sounds, not just where the faders sit.
• Every output is leveled on its own, across all songs: output 1 is matched against output 1 in every other song, output 2 against output 2, and so on for every output your stems use. Outputs are never tied to each other, so a quiet click never pulls the guide, and drums never pull the bass.
• When two stems share one output in a song, they move together and keep their balance relative to each other.
• An output used by only one song has nothing to match against, so it is left as it is.
• Corrections stop at +4 dB, well short of the fader’s +12 dB ceiling, so every leveled fader still has real headroom left for you to work with on stage.
• Nothing changes until you review the plan and click Apply. Scanning only reads; it never writes a fader on its own.

Undoing it

Library → Revert Volume Leveling restores every fader that leveling has ever touched, across every leveling run you’ve applied, not just the most recent one. Faders leveling never touched are left exactly as they were.

Stage Note Run Level Song Volumes at rehearsal, never right before you walk on stage. It’s a great tool for evening out a set list you’ve built over months, but you want time to listen through the changes first. StemDeck takes a snapshot automatically before it applies anything, so you can always get back to where you started.

Part 7

Routing and Outputs

Choosing the output device

StemDeck plays through whatever output device you pick in Settings → Audio.

Under “Output Device” you’ll find:

• A Device picker. The first entry is always “System Default” (whatever macOS is currently using). Below that, one row per audio device StemDeck can see, labeled with its name and channel count, for example “Behringer X32 (32 ch)”.
• A Refresh Devices button, for when you plug something in after opening Settings.

Pick a device and StemDeck switches to it immediately. That choice is remembered on this Mac only. It has nothing to do with your song library, so a laptop dedicated to the practice room and a laptop dedicated to the stage can each remember their own interface without stepping on each other.

Below the picker, a status line tells you what you’re actually going to get:

• A green checkmark and “Per-stem channel routing active (N channels)” means the device has more than two outputs, and each stem’s OUT number is really being sent to its own channel.
• A gray info icon and “Stereo playback — per-stem OUT channels are ignored on a 2-channel device” means you’re on a stereo device (including “System Default” on a laptop), and every stem is being folded down to two channels no matter what its OUT number says.

If the interface you normally use isn’t connected when StemDeck launches, the picker quietly falls back to “System Default” and you get stereo playback. Nothing is lost: your routing choices are still saved, they’re just not being applied until you reconnect the real interface and select it again.

Stereo and multichannel

Whether StemDeck routes each stem to its own output, or just plays everything as one stereo mix, comes down to one thing: how many output channels the selected device reports. More than two channels, and per-stem routing kicks in. Two channels or fewer, and everything folds to stereo, OUT numbers and all.

This is why rehearsing on the laptop speakers and playing the gig on the interface look and sound different even though nothing in the song changed. At home you’re hearing a stereo fold-down. On stage, on the interface, every stem goes exactly where its OUT number says.

How a stem gets its output

Every stem has an output channel number, shown as “OUT” on its channel strip. StemDeck decides that number from three sources, checked in this order:

1. A manual output, pinned by hand on that stem and saved with the song. This travels with your library to any other Mac.
2. The routing rules on this Mac: a table of filename patterns that assigns an output by matching words in the stem’s file name.
3. Output 1, used as a fallback when nothing else applies, with the stem flagged so you notice.

The routing rules are what make dragging in a folder of stems mostly route itself. Out of the box, 1.7.0 ships with these defaults:

Table 7.1 — Default output rules.

“metronome” is just another name for a click track: it’s treated exactly like “click” for output, color, and ordering. Outputs 1 through 4 are the live outputs: click, count-in or guide, drums, and bass, the four things most bands need in the in-ears first.

Because rule-based outputs are re-derived from the filename every time a song loads, the same library folder routes correctly on a different Mac even if that Mac’s rules are set up differently, or in a different order. A manual output is the one thing that doesn’t get re-derived: once you pin it, it’s saved with the song and follows the song wherever it goes.

Setting an output by hand (the pin)

Each stem card has a small “OUT” field with up and down arrows, running from 1 to 64. Next to it is a pin glyph:

• Hollow gray pin: the output is coming from the routing rules. You can’t click a hollow pin to pin it, but typing a new number or clicking the stepper arrows does the job automatically.
• Filled amber pin: the output was set by hand and is now manual.

To go back to the routing rules, click the filled pin, or right-click the stem and choose Use Routing Rule (OUT n). To keep a routing-rule output exactly where it is (protect it from ever being re-derived, even if you edit the rules later), right-click and choose Keep OUT n as Manual.

The Assign Outputs prompt

When you add a stem whose filename doesn’t match any routing rule, StemDeck doesn’t silently guess. It shows a sheet titled “Choose outputs for new stems”:

No routing rule matches this file/these files, so it/they would play on output 1, the click output. Choose an output for each stem.

Type an output for each row, then click Assign, or click Not Now to leave it for later. Anything you leave blank stays on output 1, and StemDeck flags it: a warning triangle appears next to that song in the sidebar, and the stem’s OUT field tints amber.

Hover the warning triangle to see why it is there. The tooltip reads “Warning: no routing rule matches, so these stems play on output 1,” followed by a list of the affected stems by name and file name, and then the fix: set each stem’s OUT number on its card, or add a pattern in Settings → Channels.

You can come back to this later from Song → Assign Outputs…, which is enabled whenever the selected song has a flagged stem.

Editing the routing rules

The rules themselves live in Settings → Channels, as a table of filename patterns and output channels: “Filename patterns drive the default output channel for newly-discovered stems.”

Each row is a pattern (a plain, case-insensitive piece of text to match inside a filename) and the output channel it maps to. Click Add Pattern to add a new row, or the delete button on a row to remove it.

Order matters: patterns are checked top to bottom, and the first one that matches wins. If you want a more specific pattern to take priority over a broader one, put it higher in the table.

Once you’ve changed the rules, click Reapply to All Songs to re-run them against every stem already in your library. It never touches a manual output. Afterward it reports how many stems moved and how many stayed put, for example “14 stems re-routed, 3 kept their manual output”.

Clearing manual outputs

If you’ve pinned outputs by hand and want a fresh start, either for one song or your whole library, use Library → Clear Manual Outputs….

Choose a scope, either the currently selected song or the whole library, and StemDeck tells you exactly what will happen: the stems return to the routing rules, and anything that no longer matches a rule falls back to output 1 and gets flagged. A snapshot of your current state is taken first, so you can recover if the result isn’t what you expected.

Click Clear N Manual Output(s) to confirm, or Cancel to back out. Nothing happens until you click the confirm button.

Behringer X32 RACK

The X32 RACK is the reference live rig for StemDeck. StemDeck’s outputs arrive at the console over its X-USB card as a block of USB channels. On the console’s own Routing pages, patch those “Card” inputs into whichever input channels or buses you want to feed your in-ears from.

Get outputs 1 through 4, click, count-in or guide, drums, and bass, into the in-ears first. Those are the ones the band needs to play together. Everything past that is up to your mix.

StemDeck has no X32-specific settings of its own. The routing happens entirely on the console side, so coordinate with whoever’s running front of house before the first song.

Soundcraft Ui24R

The Ui24R exposes 32 USB channels. Playing back from StemDeck, it’s one-to-one: StemDeck output N arrives on Ui24R USB return N.

Recording is offset. The console’s own USB send layout is fixed: USB 1 and 2 are the Main L/R, 3 through 10 are Aux 1 through 8, and 11 through 32 are the console’s input channels 1 through 22. So if you want to record from console input N, pick channel N+10 in StemDeck’s record input picker, since that’s the raw USB channel the console actually sends it on.

Sample rate, buffers, and latency

Your audio interface, not StemDeck, decides the sample rate and buffer size. Stems play at whatever rate they were recorded in and get converted on the way out to match the device.

StemDeck adds a small, fixed amount of latency to every stem equally, so nothing drifts relative to anything else: your drums and your click stay perfectly locked no matter what the device’s own latency happens to be. The transport clock you see on screen already accounts for this, so what it shows is what the room actually hears, not a slightly-ahead internal number.

Connecting a MIDI controller

StemDeck listens to any Core MIDI source. Foot controllers, keyboard controllers, pad controllers, anything that sends MIDI Control Change (CC) messages will work.

There is no source picker in StemDeck. The app connects to every Core MIDI source your Mac can see and stays connected as controllers come and go.

Setup

1. Connect the controller. A USB class-compliant controller shows up in Core MIDI as soon as it is plugged in, no drivers needed.
2. For a Bluetooth controller, pair it first in macOS’s own Audio MIDI Setup utility (in Applications → Utilities). Once it is paired there, StemDeck sees it automatically.
3. Open Settings → MIDI.

An iPad running a MIDI app can also reach StemDeck over Wi-Fi, using Core MIDI’s Network Session feature. Set that up in Audio MIDI Setup on the Mac and the MIDI app on the iPad; once the session is connected, StemDeck treats it exactly like a wired controller.

Because StemDeck listens to every source at once, you do not need to tell it which controller to use. Plug something in, send it a CC message, and it works.

Default MIDI commands

Out of the box, StemDeck responds to these Control Change messages, all on MIDI channel 16:

Table 8.1 — Default MIDI commands.

A message only triggers a command when its value is 64 or higher. That matches how most foot controllers and pad controllers send button presses, including one that sends 127 on press and 0 on release: only the 127 fires anything.

CC numbers 1 through 99 double as song-select triggers: CC 1 loads the first song in the currently active setlist, CC 2 the second, and so on. This range is fixed and is not one of the steppers in Settings, so if you remap the transport CCs, keep them above 99 or you will collide with a song-select number.

Changing the mapping

Open Settings → MIDI. Five steppers control everything:

• Channel (1 to 16, default 16). Messages on any other channel are ignored.
• Play CC (default 119)
• Stop CC (default 120)
• Next CC (default 121)
• Previous CC (default 122)

There is no learn mode. Click a stepper’s arrows, or type a number, to set the CC it responds to. Changes take effect immediately, no restart needed.

Remote control from a phone or tablet

StemDeck can run a small web page from your Mac that a phone or tablet can open in its browser. From that page you can hit GO, arm LOOP, hit Stop, and pick a setlist and song, all without walking over to the laptop. The page updates live as the song changes.

This is handy for a singer who wants to drive the show from the front of the stage, or a second player who needs to see what is coming up next.

Turning it on

Open Settings → Remote.

1. Set a PIN first. It needs to be 8 to 12 characters. Until you set one, the toggle below is disabled and the tab tells you why.
2. Turn on Enable remote control. The status dot changes to “Server running.”
3. Optionally set a Service name, so the server is easy to recognize if more than one Mac is running StemDeck nearby. If you leave it blank, StemDeck uses your Mac’s own name.
4. The Port defaults to 8080. Leave it unless something else on your network already uses that port.

Once the server is running, a URL row appears with an Open button. That is the address to type into the phone or tablet’s browser, on the same Wi-Fi network as the Mac.

Connecting a device

The quickest way is the QR code:

1. Make sure the phone or tablet is on the same Wi-Fi network as the Mac.
2. In StemDeck’s main window, click the Wi-Fi icon at the far right of the top bar. It’s cyan while remote control is running (dimmed when it’s off; clicking it then opens Settings → Remote). A Connect a phone popover opens with a QR code.
3. Point the phone’s camera at the QR code and tap the link that appears. The remote opens in the browser and signs in automatically: the PIN is built into the code, so there’s nothing to type.
4. The first time, the browser shows a security warning before the page loads. This is expected: the connection is encrypted, and the certificate that encrypts it was generated on your own Mac rather than issued by an outside authority, so the browser cannot already vouch for it. Tap through the warning. It is your Mac.

Because the QR code carries the PIN, anyone who scans it can control the show. Show it to your own band, not the room.

To connect by hand instead, the same popover (and Settings → Remote) shows the address and the PIN underneath the QR code. Type the address into the phone’s browser, tap through the security warning, and enter the PIN.

Once a device is signed in, it stays signed in on that phone or tablet for 24 hours, so nobody has to re-enter the PIN at every soundcheck. Enter the wrong PIN a few times in a row and that device gets locked out for a while before it can try again, so a mistyped PIN cannot be brute-forced.

What the remote can do

From the phone, the remote page shows the same essentials as your transport: the current and next-up song, a GO button, a LOOP switch, and a Stop button. A separate screen lets you open a setlist and tap a different song to load it.

Warning The remote’s Stop is a real stop, the same as the Stop button on the transport. It is not a mute. If you want to silence the mix without losing your place in the song, use MUTE ALL at the Mac instead, not the remote.

Turning Enable remote control off at the Mac immediately logs out every connected phone and tablet. There is no partial state, off means off for everyone.

Stage Note Run the remote on a band-only Wi-Fi network where you can, not the venue’s open guest network. Test it at soundcheck, from the actual phone the singer or player will use on the night, so the one-time certificate warning and PIN entry are already behind you before doors.

Part 9

Mix Export

Why export a mix

StemDeck’s job on stage is live playback through a multi-channel interface. But the band still needs a way to rehearse the material at home, on a phone or in a car, without hauling the rig along.

Export Mix renders the song to a single stereo file that sounds like what comes out of the Mac on stage: every fader, mute, solo, pitch shift and tempo change baked in.

It is a render, not a live pass through the outputs. StemDeck reads each stem’s audio directly and mixes it offline, so there is no chance of the file catching a dropout, a click, or a stutter the way a real recording of the room might. What you get back is exactly what the faders say, every time.

Exporting

Open the song you want to export, then choose File → Export Mix… (⇧⌘E), or right-click MASTER and pick Export Mix… from there.

Either way brings up the Export Mix sheet. Its subtitle is a plain description of what you are about to get: a render of the song as you’d hear it on stage, with faders, mute, solo, pitch, tempo, and the click lead-in all honored.

The sheet has two choices to make:

• Format. Either WAV (24-bit, lossless) or AAC .m4a (smaller, high-quality). AAC is selected by default, since it is small enough to text or email and still sounds excellent. Pick WAV if a bandmate wants to drop the file straight into a DAW, or if you want an archival copy with nothing compressed away.
• Sample rate. 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, or 96 kHz. 48 kHz is the default and matches the rate most StemDeck libraries are already built at. 44.1 kHz is the older CD standard and plays on anything. 96 kHz only matters if every stem in the song was recorded at that rate to begin with.

Click Choose Location & Export…, pick a folder in the save panel, and StemDeck starts rendering. A progress readout tracks the render as it happens.

When it finishes, click Reveal in Finder to jump straight to the file.

What the export contains

The exported file matches the song exactly as you have it set up:

• Every stem’s fader level.
• Mute and solo, as currently set.
• Pitch (the transpose you’ve dialed in).
• Tempo (the playback rate you’ve dialed in).
• The click lead-in, if the song has one.
• Each stem’s start point and alignment offset.

It is a stereo file, not a multi-channel one. Whatever output each stem is routed to on stage, the export folds everything down to two channels, the way it would sound through a pair of headphones or a phone speaker.

There is no MP3 option. Export WAV and convert it with any converter you already have, such as the Music app or a third-party tool, if you specifically need an MP3.

Menu bar

StemDeck’s menu bar follows macOS conventions, with a few app-specific menus for the stage. This chapter lists every item, its shortcut, and when it is greyed out.

Help menu

• StemDeck User Guide: opens this guide in your browser.

• Show Welcome Tour ⇧⌘?: replays the seven-step onboarding tour.

• Join the StemDeck Mailing List…: opens the mailing list signup form (tips, beta builds, a vote on what gets built next). Optional; see Joining the mailing list in Part 1.

• Check for Updates…: asks the Mac App Store whether a newer StemDeck is out and tells you the answer. Greyed out while a song is playing or a dialog is open.

• Contact Support…: opens a pre-addressed email to support@edipkoinc.com.

• StemDeck Website: opens www.stemdeck44.com.

Tip Menu items that need a subscription are greyed out while StemDeck is unsubscribed or a grace period has run out. If most of the Transport and Song menus are grey, check Settings → Account first.

Keyboard and mouse shortcuts

Table 10.1 — Keyboard shortcuts in StemDeck 1.7.0.

Table 10.2 — Mouse and trackpad gestures.

These two tables cover every shortcut and gesture in the app. Most controls, including seek, mute, solo, and the OUT field, are mouse-only by design: they’re things you set up before the show, not things you touch mid-song.

Settings

Open Settings with ⌘,. It has seven tabs.

Snapshots

A list by date with a Restore… button each, empty state “No snapshots yet.”, and Take Snapshot Now, Refresh, Show in Finder.

Where StemDeck keeps things

Your songs, stems, and setlists live in your library folder, wherever you chose it (the default is ~/Music/StemDeck). It looks like this:

~/Music/StemDeck/
├── Neon Moon (110)/
│   ├── .stemdeck.json       (hidden, per-song metadata)
│   ├── Click.wav
│   ├── Drums.wav
│   └── Bass.wav
├── Foreplay - Long Time (92)/
│   └── ...
├── setlists/
│   └── jimmyts-XXXXXXXX.json
└── .stemdeck-library.json   (hidden cache, rebuilt from a Rescan)

Each song is a folder. Inside it are the stem files and a single hidden file that carries everything StemDeck knows about the song: markers, tempo, output pins, cue placements. You never need to open or edit that file yourself.

Anything StemDeck generates for a song, a click track, a built guide, a Timeline Editor bake, lands right inside that song’s own folder alongside your stems. If you replace a built guide, the old one isn’t thrown away: it’s kept in the folder labeled “Guide (replaced <date>)” so you can go back to it.

A deleted song’s folder goes to the Trash, not straight to the void, you can recover it in Finder the same way you’d recover anything else you deleted by mistake.

Your per-Mac settings, the audio device you picked, your routing rules, MIDI mappings, remote-control setup, master volume, live outside the library folder entirely, in StemDeck’s own app data. That’s why they don’t travel when you move your library to another Mac. Snapshots live there too; Settings → Snapshots → Show in Finder opens that location for you.

Subscription and account

StemDeck Pro is required to perform with StemDeck: transport, song tools, library tools, and export are all unavailable without an active subscription. The library and Guide Builder are also on the subscription; a locked copy of StemDeck can look at your songs but can’t run a show.

Two plans, both with a 7-day free trial for new subscribers:

• Monthly, $12.99
• Annual, $129.99

Family Sharing is supported: one subscription can cover your whole Apple ID family group.

Settings → Account shows exactly where you stand:

• “StemDeck Pro — active”
• “Grace period — N launch(es) left”
• “Not subscribed”

Below that: Subscribe Now (opens the subscribe screen), Manage Subscription (opens Apple’s own subscriptions page, where you can cancel or change plans), and Restore Purchases, with a caption explaining what it’s for: if you previously subscribed on this Apple ID and StemDeck isn’t recognizing it, Restore Purchases re-checks with Apple.

Pre-show checklist

Run this list before every show. It takes about five minutes and it has saved more than one opening song.

If the library shows moved or unavailable

StemDeck never guesses about your library. If the folder it used last time is not where it expects, or cannot be read, it stops and asks. It does not delete or change anything until you choose. Here is what each prompt means and what to do at a gig.

Backups that actually restore

Two different things need backing up, and StemDeck only does one of them for you.

Song information (markers, downbeats, BPM, guide cue maps, faders, manual outputs, setlists) is covered by snapshots. One is taken at every launch and before every bulk change, and File → Save Snapshot takes one whenever you like. Restore from Settings → Snapshots; StemDeck shows what would change and snapshots the current state first, so a restore is reversible.

Audio is never in a snapshot. Your stems, generated clicks, built guides, and Timeline Editor bakes live in the library folder and nowhere else. Back it up with Library → Back Up Library… (see “Backing up your library” in Part 3), to an external drive, a cloud-synced folder or a separate backup folder. Each run adds a dated restore point; only new or changed stems are added, so after the first run a backup is quick. If a stem file is lost and you have no backup, StemDeck cannot bring it back.

A good habit before a run of shows: Save Snapshot, then Back Up Library. If you ever need to run from the backup (on this Mac, or on another one), use Library → Restore from Backup…: pick a restore point and it brings back the library, the output device, channel rules, MIDI, snapshots and undo history in one step.

Troubleshooting

Getting help

• Help → StemDeck User Guide opens the latest version of this guide.
• Help → Check for Updates… tells you whether a newer StemDeck is on the Mac App Store.
• Help → Contact Support… starts an email to support@edipkoinc.com. Include your StemDeck version (StemDeck → About StemDeck), your Mac and macOS version, the audio interface, and what you expected to happen versus what happened. If a song misbehaves, File → Export Song… and attach the package.
• Help → StemDeck Website for news and updates.

StemDeck is made by a working musician who runs it on stage every week. Bug reports with steps to reproduce get fixed.