Digital Performer 12 separates stems in-house and renders Atmos inside the DAW

MOTU shipped Digital Performer 12 on 15 September. The two headline additions are stem separation and Dolby Atmos mixing, and in both cases the detail worth reading is where the work happens.

Separation MOTU wrote itself

MOTU says the stem separation is driven by technology “developed entirely in-house by MOTU engineering”. It splits a finished mix into drums, bass, vocals and guitar, plus a stem MOTU calls ensemble strings and brass.

That last one is the unusual part. A typical four-way split stops at drums, bass, vocals and everything else, which leaves orchestral parts buried in the remainder. Here strings and brass come out together as one stem, not as two.

Atmos without a second application

The Dolby Atmos Renderer is built into DP12. You mix in real time and export a Dolby Atmos ADM file from the DAW, and Dolby’s separate Renderer app is optional rather than required. Monitoring runs on speaker systems up to 9.1.6, or binaurally on ordinary headphones.

The editing changes

A new Arrangement Strip sits below the timeline and reorders song sections across every track by dragging coloured bars. Sections snap together, but gaps are allowed for scoring to picture, and Option or Alt dragging duplicates a section.

Track Freeze now freezes the original track in place with one click instead of adding a separate frozen track, and frozen tracks can still be mixed. MusicXML can now be imported as well as exported, for round trips with Dorico, Sibelius and MuseScore. Frame rates go up to 120 fps, and VST3 plug-ins migrate automatically.

Price

$499 for a new licence. Upgrades are $195 from the previous version, $295 from Performer, and $395 from Performer Lite, AudioDesk or a competing DAW.

Producer’s note

Treat separated stems as material to mute, practise against or remix, not as clean multitracks. Artefacts that the full mix hides become obvious once a stem is soloed and then compressed or brightened, so do the heavy processing on the stems you are least likely to expose.