Hacker News Reader

Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

1. Why oh why is 'there are 4 tracks' hard-coded into the format? What a perverse limitation. I understand there has to be a limit if you want hardware players to mix in real-time but 4 seems too low and Stem v2 will probably be needed next year to get round this.

2. This seems like a wasted opportunity in terms of adding extra features that wouldn't complicate implementation terribly much. Tracks could allow time offsets and repeats - you've then got a loop-friendly pseudo-tracker file format at very little extra cost.

View on HN

1. When you DJ, your main resource is attention — and while I have experience with Ableton live sets, trying to juggle more than 4 channels of a track that you sometimes heard once or twice before is not a very good idea, tbh. Also, Stems format was created by NI after they already succesfully creates Remix Packs format, and in my experience, 4 channels that Remix Packs have is quite a good balance — not to say that all NI Traktor gear is created for 4 channels in mind.

2. Once again, extra features not only complicate implementation, but also user experience. What exactly would you be able to do with time offsets and repeats that you can't do with Traktor's deck looping and loop recorder already?

> trying to juggle more than 4 channels of a track

sounds more like a tooling problem, stems should be able to be grouped by type with little effort (e.g., all the drumish things visually represented as one fake stem)

First of all — no, it's an attention problem. I've used APC40 in a live performance once, but in live perfomance (where you play your own music in more or less pre-determined fashion), unlike the DJ set (where you play other people's music, changing the playlist dynamically according to the crowd), it's easier to manage. Apart from monitoring the crowd, searching the next track, marking it and pre-listening (because unless it's in the hundred or two hundreds of tracks you know by heart, you may not know what's the best point cue it it and how), playing with FX, letting the photographer park his backpack under your table, answering to some random question by the manager, you also should have some amount of your attention on reserve, so that when some unforeseeable shit happens, you won't butcher up the mix and people stay entertained.

Regardless, if you already want to group the "drummish" stems, then why would you want to deal with the separately in the first place?

Hi, my initial thought was the same. Why limit it to 4? Although I have recently learned the idea behind their decision was that most DJ music can be broken down into 4 elements. Drums, vocals, bass & riff. Having realised this, I now tend to agree that it should be limited to 4. Another reason I have heard was that they limited it to 4 due to Native instruments hardware limitations and playing several tracks at once would cause performance issues.

I have been producing electronic music for some time now. I don't think I have ever had a piece with less than a dozen tracks.

Yes, in the end it boils down to the 4 mentioned, but while you produce, you want way more than that.

It is mostly aimed to do lives, so 4 tracks is generally enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com