6 Easy Steps for Exporting Stems on Garageband

With this simple piece of software, you’ll definitely get started on the right path to success, but exporting stems can be tricky. It doesn’t have a feature that will allow you to export multiple stems at the same time, so I’d recommend a cup of coffee and a lot of patience. If you haven’t read our blog about what stems are and why you’d need to export them for mixing and mastering, you can find that here: https://recordat411.com/how-to-prepare-your-song-for-mixing/

 

Thankfully we’re here you walk you through it.

Let’s get started:

Step 1: In the window that contains all your tracks, you’re going to need to press the speaker icon on all of the tracks you want to mute. With this, you are ensuring that the only file heard is the file you want. The orange-colored track is the one that is going to be heard while the grey-colored tracks are not.

 

 

Step 2: To export your track, press ‘Share’ and then select ‘Send Song to iTunes’ from the top menu in Garageband

Step 3: When you do this, a menu is going to pop up that allows you to name your playlist and tend to other details. After filling it out, click ‘Share’

Step 4: Now iTunes appears, you can scroll down and find the name of your playlist

Step 5: After finding you have found your playlist and it opens, it is going to show you the tracks that have just been bounced. You should be able to see that the track defaults have the same name as the playlist. A good idea would be to rename each track as soon as you bounce them to avoid confusion down the line.

Step 6: To change the name of the track, simply click on the current name until the cursor appears. After renaming your track, press enter on your keyboard.

Step 7: Repeat until all of the individual tracks are in the playlist.

 

And you’re done, my friends.

This is quite a simple feat, but for new producers, it’s just about getting your feet wet and listening to your own work as a professional file.

If you’d like to learn more about mixing, here’s a great book I’d like to recommend. It’ll explain what different tools actually do to the sound and will help you make better mixing decisions. Check out the preview here: The Art of Mixing: A Visual Guide to Recording, Engineering, and Production

 

Hope this helps, thank me later, Chris.

Photos courtesy of: Music2be

How to Export Stems In Ableton Live

 

If you are sending your song to us online for mixing and mastering, it’s very important to make sure your files are sent correctly. Thankfully, Ableton makes it quick and easy for you to export your stems!

A stem is a single element of the song exported as a single file. Multiple tracks that you’re rendering at one time can be put together to recreate the song. Ableton has a very simple and straight forward way of doing this, so let’s go through it now!

Step 1 – Label Your Tracks

Before exporting anything, you need to make sure everything is labeled. Whenever you send your files to someone else, it’s important to make sure the person it’s going to knows what every file contains. Ableton exports multiple audio tracks, so if you have a vocal and a snare on one single track, it will make things a little bit crazy. It also labels the audio tracks based on what the track names are, and not the clip names. Select each track name and label them to represent what that tracks are doing. 

Step 2 – Arrangement Is Everything!

Ableton’s session view allows you to play various Scenes and Clips in any particular order. You can render audio from the Session view just specify the amount of time with your current selection that you would like to have rendered.

In the Arrangement View, you can either drag-select the area that you would like to export…

Or, you can use the loop selection range to choose what area of the song you’d like to export…

In this mode, just make sure that you have something in the arrangement!

Step 3 – Export

Once you’re ready to export your stems to audio and you’ve highlighted your arrangement (or set up your loop range), press: Command-Shift-R

This box will appear:

Ensure the bottom section of the box indicates the right time range.

Indicate if you want to render in stereo, or mono. For stems, or separated tracks, choose “mono”. If you have stereo loops in your arrangement, you will need to go back and render those in “stereo” separately.

Finally, select the all the tracks you want to export. If yo want all the tracks, select the “All Tracks” option.

Important: When Ableton Live asks you where you want to save the ‘audio file’, create a new folder and name it by the name of the song. Export all of those files in the same folder.  

Once complete, follow this link to our upload form and follow the instructions.

Image credit: https://ask.audio/articles/exporting-stems-in-ableton-live