beaTunes News

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Update: beaTunes 4.6.8

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Mostly thanks to user-feedback, today's update fixes a number of little things having to do with showing the right cursor, dealing with filter issues, synchronization artifacts etc. That aside, the most important change is probably, that for now I have dropped support for directly writing to STEM files. Whenever the file manipulation happens via iTunes (in an iTunes-based library), things work as expected. But beaTunes itself will not modify STEM files anymore. It turned out that the library beaTunes uses for MP4 manipulation wasn't able to correctly adjust a certain value for all five streams contained in a STEM, which led to problems when playing the file in Traktor. The problem is understood and fixed, but a newer version of the library that contains the fix is not released yet.

People using MIK made me aware that it uses different tags when writing the initial key into OGG and FLAC files. I have updated beaTunes to make sure that they are imported correctly.

Last but not least, a bug that led to rare application crashes was fixed in both MFSampledSP and FFSampledSP, which is why I updated both libraries.

As always, you can download the new version from the download section of the website.

Most important changes in 4.6.8

  • Added support for MIK-style key tags for OGG and FLAC.
  • Fixed loss of sort order after folder-based library sync.
  • Fixed manually entered ratings shown as computed until sync.
  • Fixed possible disappearing resize cursor for table headers.
  • Fixed display refresh problem when editing inline while a filter is set.
  • Removed some tagging support for stems, due to file corruption issues.
  • Improved automatic iTunes library detection (non-ASCII paths).
  • Improved resilience against Windows COM errors.
  • Moved to MFSampledSP 0.9.7.
  • Moved to FFSampledSP 0.9.15.

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Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Splitting Stems with Java, FFmpeg, and FFSampledSP

Just a short note regarding the FFSampledSP library: Version 0.9.12 now provides an API for splitting Stem files into their parts. For a simple code sample, check out this page.

To split Stems from the command line, please take a look at my post from September 2015.

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Thursday, September 17, 2015

Destemming Stems

DJ Techtools just ran a great story that explains how to extract individual stems from stem files using FFmpeg and Audacity. Their well working approach is a mixture of installation, configuration and drag and drop.

If you are using OS X and are comfortable on the command line, you might appreciate a different approach, allowing you to batch destem your stem files to a format of your choice. To do so, simply install FFmpeg, so that it is in the PATH. Then download the BASH script destem.sh and make sure it's executable (chmod u+x destem.sh) and in the PATH as well (if you don't know how to do that, please do not ask me, but Mr. Google.).

Once installed, the script is pretty self-explanatory. Open a terminal window, go to the folder that contains your stems and type:

MyMac$ destem.sh aif .

This will destem all files in the current directory and encode the results in AIFF. Other formats are possible. To get a list, simply type:

MyMac$ destem.sh

Yep. Just don't give it any arguments. Explicitly supported are: m4a | flac | wav | ogg | aif.

Enjoy.

PS: The script may fail, if there are less/more than 4 stems plus the original in a file. It really isn't the sharpest tool from the shed.

Image by Joshua Rappeneker

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