Exporting Stems for Mixing - Need Help!

Hi all

I am trying to export a song project to go to a mixing facility. I am in Logic Pro 9.

File > Export > All tracks as audio files

The problem I'm having is that all the stems are coming out at different lengths - as opposed to the same length for each stem with blank space where nothing is happening.

Does anyone know what I am doing wrong?

Thanks very much

Scott

Macbook Pro 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Sep 28, 2009 10:04 PM

Reply
10 replies

Sep 28, 2009 11:56 PM in response to SKEL_73

That's what it's meant to do - all the tracks begin at the same point and are as long as they need to be.
Do they actually HAVE to be the same length?

If they do, either use the bounce function for one track at a time (there are tricks to do multiple tracks at once if you have a multi-output interface - or try this http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3650), or put some empty audio/midi at the desired end of each track to fool Logic into rendering that far.

Message was edited by: bemuzed

Sep 29, 2009 6:08 AM in response to bill borez

bemused is right... this is normal behavior.

As long as all the tracks START at the same point, which they will when exporting, the length of each individual track is determined by what audio (or MIDI) is on that track.

If the lead guitar no longer plays after the guitar solo, why would you want blank audio till the end of the song? That wastes hard drive space, and actually makes the DAW the mixer is using work harder, as his/her hard drive is having to stream audio that doesn't contain anything at that point.

This is a feature, not a problem.

Sep 29, 2009 8:47 AM in response to Jim Frazier

I have to do this all the time for work. I'm assuming the most important thing is that the track all start at the same time for your 3rd party mixer.

If you want your stems exported "in place", meaning you want the pan and volume settings preserved, then you just need to bounce each(with the same start time track soloed.

If you want to preserve your channel strip processing, but print all the tracks at full volume, then you can "export tracks as audio" in one shot. These will print form the top of the song session, which might not be what you want, but at least will have a common start time. The tracks will still have varying end times though.

If you want the tracks bone-dry so your mixer can do all the processing, remember to bypass all plugins.

Also, be aware of whether you want your send effects printed and take steps to get the desired result.

You can't do a mono bounce in Logic (that I know of) so if you want your mono tracks (like a bas guitar) to be mono, you'll have to export the track (rather than bounce) being sure the track is set to mono.

Your choices will depend on whether you want to deliver stems that can be used to recreate your mix easily but allow the re-mixer to make small changes, or you want to give the remixer total control. Usually you'll bounce stems "in place" for commercials and tv shows that just need to be able to adjust a few levels, but you'll want to give a real mixer (like for an album or single) dryer, full-code stems to work with (except where your processing and effects are an important part of the sound or your artistic expression)

Sep 29, 2009 9:57 AM in response to bdevoid

bdevoid wrote:
You can't do a mono bounce in Logic (that I know of) so if you want your mono tracks (like a bas guitar) to be mono, you'll have to export the track (rather than bounce) being sure the track is set to mono.


FYI... this can easily be done, by temporarily clicking the stereo link symbol at the bottom of the stereo output channel (beside the bounce button), and changing it to mono.

Anything bounced at that point will be bounced as a mono audio file.

Sep 29, 2009 10:02 AM in response to Jim Frazier

Anything bounced at that point will be bounced as a mono audio file.

But only via the little Bounce button at the bottom of the 1-2 outs channelstrip (1 in this case), Bounces via an assigned Keycommand are always stereo.

I also do stems by assigning the stems to different outs of my RME and looping them back digitally into Logic. This way I can record up to 28 stereo stems at the same time which saves a lot of time.

Sep 29, 2009 10:11 AM in response to SKEL_73

if some of your tracks are not starting at measure one,,, and you want to make sure that logic renders all tracks starting from bar one,, then just add a silent region at the beginning of each track that does not start at bar one,, logic will then render out each track from bar 1 and so on........



pardon me if someone already mentioned this but i read the replies and did not see anything....

Nov 11, 2009 1:54 PM in response to bdevoid

Isn't there really no other way of doing this:

"If you want your stems exported "in place", meaning you want the pan and volume settings preserved, then you just need to bounce each (with the same start time) track soloed. "

I might add that I also need to preserve the sends to aux's (in this case reverbs shared by many tracks) in the bounce.

It's seems like something that could be done more easily than soloing the stems and bouncing them individually. I'm right now doing a project where a feature doing this automatically would save me a lot of time...

Nov 11, 2009 2:32 PM in response to mattuck

If you've got stuff going out to buses/auxiliaries its not crazy to record the result of them first before you bounce is it? Engineers have traditionally had to do sub-mixes when working with tape based recording and there's a logical workflow (not sure about using a popular buzzword but it does mean something) that can be applied.

I'm not convinced by software that makes everything too easy because you lose perspective about the basic mental processes that you need to keep being aware of if you're going to be creative.

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Exporting Stems for Mixing - Need Help!

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