“Any alternative mix, any time generated from your stems, faster than real-time and available online, off-line. No need for expensive recalls or remixes, save time in mastering, get the right mix at the right time.”

Background.

Stem Studio is an ongoing project and collaboration with friend and former colleague Andrei Maberley (audio Engineer, producer). Targeting recording artists and producers, stem.studio is an online tool to help improve workflow and remove unnecessary steps in the editing/mixing/mastering process.

Development.

The web-app is developed using Django, with the audio processing written in Python 3. Using Django allowed us to access the broad toolkit of the Python programming language to, among many other things, manipulate and process audio files from the web. The development process has involved lots of storage and bandwidth calculation/estimations, taking into account a plethora of use cases to ensure we can cater to most, if not all, needs. Much work has been done to ensure audio is not compressed and that audio quality does not diminish (at all) when using the tool. We’ve also had to focus much attention to server security, which is still to be tested and reiterated on. Although the service is fairly well optimized and runs on the cheapest of web servers, we anticipate that with the increase in users/usage, the system requirements will drastically change.

Status.

After having released a successful MVP and limited user testing the project went on hold, much due to COVID. The next steps in the production will be a new interface, as well as finding a hosting solution to handle large files, both for processing and storage. The design is being finalised (sneak peak on the right) and will focus on usability and accessibility. We will be getting ready to promote and publish the service in a limited capacity in the coming few months.

Tools

• Python3 / Django (mod_wsgi)

• Visual Studio Code

• Figma