

In short, multitracks are audio files featuring individual sounds that are unprocessed and make up a full arrangement collectively. What is the difference between stems and tracks? To do so, they’ll ask for a handful of files that contain the channel groups of your track or one file containing everything. Their goal is to ensure your track sounds good on most to all sound systems by adding some final adjustments to ensure it sounds professional.

Their goal is to make every bit of multitrack audio work together audibly and, most of all, harmoniously.īut a mastering engineer doesn’t need so much flexibility. In practice, a mixing engineer needs full flexibility when making everything work together, so they need the multitrack files of every recording and sample in your project. In this scenario, they’d ask for stems or even a final stereo file. Stems and multitracks both have benefits, but your needs dictate which is better for the task at hand.įor example, sending multitracks to a mastering engineer can be too much.
