February 25, 2026 — by Asaf Fulks
After 20+ years behind the console, I’ve learned one thing about mixing: most of the early decisions are the same every time. Load the stems. Gain stage. Set the panning. Slap an EQ and compressor on every track. Dial in the low cut. Check the phase. It’s the same routine whether you’re mixing a trap beat or a country ballad — and it eats hours before you even get to the creative part.
So I built the thing I always wished existed.
StemDesk™ is a complete AI-powered mixing, mastering, and music generation studio. Drop your stems in, get a mixed, mastered, release-ready bounce back — no DAW required, no extra plugins required. Or export directly to Pro Tools and Reaper with everything pre-loaded. It ships with its own built-in plugin suite, runs entirely on your local machine, and doesn’t upload a single byte of your audio to the cloud. Ever.
This isn’t another plugin. This isn’t another website you upload to and pray. This is a session-level AI that sees your entire mix, understands it, and makes it better — then lets you generate brand new music on top of it.
It Listens Before It Touches Anything
StemDesk doesn’t just slap a preset chain on every track. It runs deep spectral analysis on every stem in your session — frequency content, dynamics, transients, loudness, spectral shape, all of it. Then it maps out exactly where your stems are competing with each other in the frequency spectrum. You can see it in the spectral conflict heatmap — a visual grid that shows you which tracks are fighting in which bands. Click any red cell and StemDesk shows you the problem and the surgical EQ fix it already computed.
And here’s the thing: it only processes what actually needs processing. If a stem owns its frequency space and doesn’t conflict with anything, StemDesk leaves it alone. No unnecessary EQ cuts. No compression on tracks that already have good dynamics. No saturation on clean acoustic parts. Less processing, more natural mixes. The way it should be.
87 Genre Profiles. Not 6. Not 10. Eighty-Seven.
Hip-hop doesn’t sound like country. StemDesk knows that. But it goes way deeper than “rock vs. pop.” There are 87 genre profiles across 12 families — Trap, Drill, Phonk, Boom Bap, Neo-Soul, K-Pop, Reggaeton, Afrobeats, Amapiano, Doom Metal, Classical, Film Score, Podcast, and everything in between. Each profile has calibrated gain targets and relational balance rules that reflect how a real mix engineer would approach that genre. The kick-to-bass relationship in a trap beat is completely different from a folk record, and StemDesk knows exactly how to handle both.
One-Click Auto-Mix. 60 Seconds. No DAW.
This is the one that changes everything.
Drop your stems into StemDesk. Click Auto-Mix. In under 60 seconds, you get a fully processed stereo WAV bounce — gain staging, panning, EQ, compression, saturation, volume rides, sidechain ducking, and mix bus processing, all applied in a single pass. Adjustable processing intensity lets you dial between subtle correction and aggressive processing. The default is 25% — just enough to clean everything up without crushing what you already had.
No Pro Tools. No Reaper. No DAW at all. StemDesk processes everything standalone using its own built-in DSP engine. You don’t even need third-party plugins installed. It ships complete.
One-Click Mastering for Every Platform
Once your mix is done, master it for any platform with one click. Spotify at -14 LUFS. Apple Music at -16. Club/DJ at -8. Broadcast at -23 (EBU R128). YouTube, Tidal, SoundCloud, CD, or set your own custom target. True peak limiting, automatic gain compensation, resampling, dithering — all handled. Before and after measurements so you can see exactly what changed.
No separate mastering app. No upload to a mastering website. It’s built right into the same session.
Ships With Its Own Plugin Suite
This is a big one. StemDesk comes with a complete AAX/VST plugin suite built in C++/JUCE — SD Monitor, SD Parametric EQ, SD Compressor, SD De-esser, SD Gate, and SD Saturator. These aren’t demo plugins or stripped-down versions. They’re the real processing engine that powers the entire system, and they work inside Pro Tools and Reaper as standard plugins.
No third-party plugins required. You don’t need to own FabFilter, iZotope, Waves, or anything else. StemDesk ships ready to go out of the box.
But if you do own FabFilter? StemDesk generates calibrated .ffp presets for your existing plugins — Pro-Q, Pro-C, Saturn, Pro-L, Pro-DS, Pro-MB, Pro-G — per-stem, with user-selectable plugin versions. So whether you’re running stock StemDesk plugins or your own FabFilter suite, you’re covered.
It Talks to Your DAW
StemDesk works standalone, but when you want DAW integration, it goes deep.
Pro Tools: Real-time fader and pan control via HUI protocol over virtual MIDI with 14-bit precision. Or build a brand new Pro Tools session from your stems via PTSL with automatic sample rate conversion.
Reaper: Export a complete .rpp project file with all plugins and presets pre-loaded on every track. Open it in Reaper and your entire mix is there — every EQ curve, every compressor setting, every gain ride, ready to tweak.
Three DAW workflows plus standalone. Four ways to deliver from one app.
AI Music Generation — Local, Free, Unlimited
Here’s where it gets crazy.
StemDesk auto-detects the key and BPM of your session. Need a vocal hook? A bass line for the bridge? A piano part to fill out the chorus? Tell it what you want, pick a style, and StemDesk generates it locally on your GPU — matched to your key, locked to your tempo. Write your own lyrics, paste in a concept and let the AI write them for you, or go instrumental-only.
Every generation gets automatically split into 4 separate stems via Demucs — drums, bass, vocals, instruments — and dropped into your session ready to mix. No dragging files around. No bouncing to another app.
The AI model is ACE-Step 1.5, MIT-licensed and fully free. No cloud processing. No API fees. No per-generation charges. Generate as much as you want, forever. The AI runs on your machine and your machine alone.
Talk to It Like a Human
You don’t need to hunt through menus or twist knobs. Just type what you hear.
“Kick needs more punch.”
“Vocals are buried.”
“Too much mud in the low end.”
“Make the snare brighter.”
StemDesk’s AI translates your plain-English feedback into specific gain, EQ, and compression adjustments across the relevant tracks. It understands audio context — it knows that “more punch” on a kick means something different than “more punch” on a vocal. Say what’s wrong, and it fixes it.
AI Intelligence Panel
There’s a full AI co-engineer built into the dashboard. Four modules:
- Critique — Objective analysis of your mix with specific fix suggestions
- Coach — Educational guidance that explains why every AI decision was made, so you learn as you go
- Diagnostics — Identifies phase issues, clipping, frequency pileups, and other technical problems
- Spectral Heatmap — Interactive frequency conflict grid showing exactly where stems compete
Smart prompt suggestions based on your actual stems. AI lyric generation from text concepts. Ask it questions in plain English and get real answers about your mix. This isn’t a chatbot bolted onto a DAW. It’s an AI that actually understands audio.
Volume Rides and Sidechain Ducking — Automated
Two things that every mix needs and no AI tool has ever automated properly.
Volume rides: StemDesk analyzes each stem in time-windowed chunks, calculates loudness per segment, and writes fader automation that keeps levels consistent before compression even touches the signal. Quiet verses get lifted, loud choruses get tamed. The same fader ride a mix engineer does manually — automated.
Sidechain ducking: Bass ducks when the kick hits. Pads duck for vocals. Guitars clear space for lead lines. StemDesk detects which stems need ducking based on spectral overlap and timing, computes the amount and release, and bakes it into the auto-mix or exports it as DAW automation. No manual routing.
Stem Separation and A/B Compare
Don’t have stems? No problem. Drop any finished 2-track mix into StemDesk and Demucs — Meta’s neural stem separation model — splits it into drums, bass, vocals, and instruments, all running locally on your GPU.
Then use the built-in A/B toggle to compare your raw stems against the processed mix at the same timestamp. Space bar plays, Tab toggles. Hear exactly what StemDesk changed, instantly.
Reference Track Matching
Drop a reference track and StemDesk compares your mix against it — frequency balance, loudness, dynamics, stereo width. Get a match score and specific EQ correction curves that push your mix toward the reference’s tonal signature. Built-in MP3 compensation so lossy references don’t skew the analysis.
Built by an Engineer, for Engineers
I didn’t build StemDesk from a textbook. I built it from thousands of real sessions — hip-hop, pop, R&B, rock, country, Latin, everything that’s come through OC Recording over the past two decades. Credits on Netflix, ESPN, MTV, and Disney. Records with Grammy-winning and platinum-selling artists. Three #1 hits mixed for Common Kings. A Billboard-charting Christian Rock track for Whosoever South.
Every gain staging target, every EQ curve, every genre profile in StemDesk comes from actual professional practice — not academic datasets or synthetic training data. This is what happens when a working engineer builds the tool he always wished existed.
But it’s not just for seasoned engineers. If you’re a home producer still learning, StemDesk gives you a professional starting point and shows you why it made every decision. It’s a tool and a teacher.
When Can You Get It?
StemDesk is in the final stretch of development. I’ll be sharing screenshots, demo videos, pricing details, and beta access soon.
If you want to be first in line, hit the waitlist:
STEMDESK.AI · STEMDESK.NET · USPTO Serial No. 99670978
This has been a passion project — everything I’ve learned about mixing, mastering, and music production, distilled into the most complete AI audio studio I could imagine. It’s almost here.
— Asaf
Tags: ai mixing, ai mastering, ai music generation, audio engineering, auto mixing, music production, music tech, oc recording, Pro Tools, Reaper, stemdesk, FabFilter