Blog
Working things out by ear
What stem separation is actually good for once you are learning a part or recording a cover. Split a song up and things you could never quite hear turn out to have been there all along.
Written by the people behind StemStudio. Less about the tool than about the places where learning a song tends to stall, and how to get past them. Now and then there is a piece about computers and networks getting in the way, too.
Adding more supported formats is what broke it on iPhone
Widening the list of accepted file types made the tools unusable on iOS. The stricter version had been the more helpful one. What went wrong, and how it was fixed.
FilesMeasuredBugs2 min readThe browser said it could do it, and produced a broken file
The API that reports supported recording formats returned true, and the result was a corrupt 1,690-byte MP4. The four measurements, and why the fix was to stop asking and start measuring.
VideoMeasuredBugs3 min readI asked for 1 Mbps and got a file 2.8 times that size
Setting a bitrate when compressing video does not give you a file of that size. Measured here: 2.8 times what was requested. Why that happens, and what to change instead.
VideoFilesMeasured4 min readHow much faster is "tempo +1" on a karaoke machine?
Press tempo +1 and the song speeds up — by how much? Makers do not publish the step size, so here is how to measure it yourself and how to build a practice track at the same speed at home. Changing the tempo does not change the key.
KaraokeTempoPractice5 min readHow many semitones should you lower a song by?
The original sits too high and the chorus hurts. Lowering the key fixes that — until the low passages stop speaking. Where the useful range is, what it costs in quality, and why the order of operations matters.
KaraokeKey changePractice5 min readIs it safe to upload your files to an online tool?
That small hesitation before you drop a PDF onto a converter site. Here is what actually differs between upload-based and in-browser tools, and how to check which one you are looking at yourself.
SafetyIn-browser processingFiles3 min readGarbled text is not corruption — it is the wrong reading
A CSV opens as nonsense in Excel; an email subject line is unreadable. The file is not damaged: it was written in one encoding and read in another.
EncodingCSVTroubleshooting3 min readQR codes that still scan once printed
Generating a QR code is easy; discovering it will not scan off the printed page is the expensive part. The four things that cause it, and the shortened-URL trap.
QR codesPrintBasics2 min readMerging PDFs — order, and what gets left behind
How to combine several PDFs into one, and what the result quietly loses. Worth knowing before you send a contract or an application.
PDFFilesWork2 min read“Can you make this image smaller?” — smaller how?
Dimensions, file size and quality are three different things. Which one you move changes the work entirely. Here is how to pick, and how to do each.
ImagesFilesBasics2 min readWhat your photos carry: where and when they were taken
Photos from a phone carry the time, the camera model and often the exact location. What survives, what gets stripped, and how to remove it when it matters.
PhotosPrivacyBasics3 min readPassword strength is mostly length
Mix in symbols, change it every three months — the long-standing password advice is no longer what the guidelines recommend. Here is what actually makes a difference.
PasswordsSecurityBasics2 min readWhat an IP address does and does not reveal
Can an IP address give away your home address or your name? Here is where the line actually falls, set out as what it does reveal and what it does not.
IP addressInternetBasics3 min readWhen your mail lands in spam, or never arrives
Mail that never reaches the recipient, or goes straight to their spam folder. On a custom domain the cause is usually SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Here is what each one actually checks, and how to see yours.
EmailDNSTroubleshooting5 min readSlow internet: what actually helps, and what does not
Video stalling in the evening, fine in the morning — what genuinely fixes a slow connection, and which widely repeated tweaks stopped mattering years ago. Starting with how to find the bottleneck.
InternetSpeedWi-Fi4 min readUsing stems for sampling and remixing
Lift a drum track to build on, or take a vocal phrase somewhere new. Three ways to put stem separation to work in a DAW, and three tricks for making the separation artefacts sit down.
productionremixsampling3 min readMaking your own backing track for a cover
No official off-vocal for the song you want to sing? Stem separation will make you one. The three-step process, plus two tricks for cleaning up whatever vocal is left behind.
coverskaraoke trackvocal removal4 min readThree ways stem separation makes learning a song by ear much easier
The bass is buried under the kick, the drum fill is gone before you can catch it. Three ways to get past the usual walls when your band is learning a cover.
ear trainingband practicestem separation