Up until now, if you were a Denon DJ and you wanted to play around with stems in your sets, you were stuck with having to use Serato. Now, by bringing in this much-requested feature, Engine has finally caught up to the rest of the DJ software options.
The new Engine 4.2 update brings in stems analysis that allows you to analyse and play back stems elements of your tracks on their supported devices. They’re rolling this out in a couple of stages so read on to find out all the details.
How to use Stems on Engine DJ 4.2
Stems in Engine DJ 4.2 don’t work in real-time, instead you’ve got to pre-render them in the desktop software. You can do this by just dragging tracks into the Stems folder, which then creates an analysed version. We found this took about 1 minute to do 10 tracks on our M2 Pro MacBook. That’s not too much of an issue, as this happens before you export to the USB, but expect longer rendering times on older computers.
Once you’ve created these stem-separated tunes, they can then be exported to a USB or SD card using Sync Manager. All of these tracks are stored in the Stems folder in Engine and are also available in your regular playlists as well, and are marked with the stems symbol to show they’ve been analysed.
Also, as it only works on locally stored files, you can’t do stems separation for any streaming tracks.
How to get Stems on the Denon Prime 4+
At first, this new update will just unlock Stems playback on the Denon Prime 4+. From November 20, Prime 4+ users can play these Stems-analysed tracks for free.
Accessing Stems is simple: after loading a track, press the Hot Cue pad mode button twice, and the top row of pads will switch the vocal, melody, bass and drums on or off. The parameter buttons also let you quickly toggle between acapella and instrumental versions of the track.
Future Compatibility and Licensing
From December 11, Engine DJ will extend Stems functionality to the rest of its supported hardware, including models from Denon DJ and Numark. While the Prime 4+ will enjoy free access, if you use anything else you’ll need a one-time license purchase to unlock Stems playback.
How do Engine stems compare to the rest?
With stems separation on Serato, djay and rekordbox now all sounding great, there’s a high bar for any other software to meet. Overall, this can’t quite compete with the best out there, which, in our opinion, are still Serato and djay. It’s probably about on par with the audio quality you get with the updated rekordbox Stems.
That makes it perfectly usable for mixing and any artefacts and weirdness are pretty hard to notice. When you get elements of the track in isolation, you can tell it’s not perfect, but we’ve still heard a lot worse.
The big step forward here that no other company can yet meet is that this is designed to work on a standalone controller. One of the biggest questions everyone was asking at the launch of the XDJ-AZ was why it couldn’t work with rekordbox stems. Now that its number-one rival has that power, there’s even more pressure on AlphaTheta to keep pace by bringing in standalone stems, too.
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