Glass Interlude
Please audition these files online, but don't click over and over. There is a
hosting charge that will eventually add up to pain.
If you want to download all the files to recreate a mix or make new tracks,
this website is still a bit of a pain because we don't have a way to collect
them all in one click. The dream is actually to use your music workstation
like this:
daw_cloud push stems
daw_cloud pull stems
something like that, definitely inspired by Git and rsync. If you are
interested enough to try this pre-alpha tooling, please reach out to John.
Mixdown
Stems
Stems are audio files that generally start together so they are easily aligned.
Effects are usually printed too (?) but it depends on how you used the DAW.
These are highly portable between DAW systems, but contain no metadata about
the session at all, not even tempo. Because they all start at the beginning of
the piece, many of them are silent until some later section which is why you
might not hear anything immediately.
Masters
Masters are the master sessions that the original producer or composer used to
write the piece. There might be more than one, because a DAW and a notation
editor could both be required. These "master" versions will always be the best
ones, because the transcoding tool cannot possibly map every single feature of
every DAW.
Ardour or Harrison Mixbus
Reaper
Derivatives
Derivatives are automatic transcodings of the master. The benefit over the
"stems" is that you get much of the metadata intact in a different DAW, which
means you hopefully can port the piece between different studios and composers
for pre-production work. These are very, very alpha quality right now, and we
don't have very many choices yet.
Ardour or Harrison Mixbus
Reaper
Media
Media are audio files that are generally the raw performances. They are often
short snippets, as opposed to stems which play for the whole session. Effects
are not printed. These start at random times, and are essentially impossible
to align without the session metadata (i.e., the Ardour or Reaper session). We
have (are making) an attempt here to port these data from the "Master" session
into "Derivatives", i.e., transcode Ardour -> Reaper so you can use the DAW of
your choice and does not have to agree with your collaborators or the pro studios
you may work in (assuming we can eventually support Pro Tools).