Stems

Stems is an audio format to be released by Native Instruments, and used in music downloads from Beatport, Juno, and Traxsource, in June 2015. In this format, musical tracks are separated into four components (known as "stems" in the music field), such as drums, vocals, and so on. They are each stored in MP4 format, and will play as a combined track in normal music player software (such as iTunes), but with appropriate software can be remixed in other ways taking advantage of the track-part separation to separately modify different parts of the sound. This feature is expected to be of particular interest to DJs who wish to achieve sound effects to their own tastes.

Files will have the double extension .stem.mp4 so that they can be treated as MP4 files by software that can deal with them, but can also be treated specially as Stems files by software with specific support.

Links

 * Stems FAQ
 * No More MP3s: Native Instruments Wants DJs to Use Their New Audio Format
 * Native Instruments unveils groundbreaking new file format for DJs
 * Can Stems Finally Make Multi-channel DJ Audio a Standard?
 * New backward-compatible audio file format can split songs into four tracks
 * Wikipedia: Stem mixing and mastering