(Well, I ruined some of my favorite music I got the Stem Player for free from Kano for review purposes.) Using the Stem Player website, I uploaded three quite different but impeccably mixed pieces of music in stem form to my player: John Coltrane’s 1958 hard-bop classic “Locomotion” Stevie Wonder’s 1967 hit “I Was Made to Love Her,” which features one of the greatest bass lines of Motown virtuoso James Jamerson and the title track to Steely Dan’s 1980 Gaucho, one of the most fussed-over albums by perhaps the fussiest band in history. The worst thing I can say about the Stem Player is pretty much everything else I have to say about it. Suffice it to say, this is not the optimal user experience for a “portable” music player. If you don’t have your laptop with you and aren’t near an internet connection but want to make even minor adjustments to your player while on the go, you’re out of luck. Finally, the only way to configure the player, add or remove tracks from it, learn what is uploaded onto it, or really do pretty much anything with it at all is to plug it into your computer via a USB-C cable and access the Stem Player website.
The haptic interface also causes the player to occasionally skip or otherwise glitch if you accidentally touch it incorrectly. The Stem Player comes with a mere 8GB of storage, a tiny amount of space considering the size of the files you’ll be loading onto it (to say nothing of how long West’s own albums tend to be). If this sounds unbelievably tedious, that’s mitigated by the fact that you won’t have very much music to sift through. It also means that if you want to go to a specific track, you need to cycle through the whole player until you find it, since there’s no search interface. The lack of a screen (which, at $200, has to be an aesthetic choice rather than a budgetary one) means that you can’t actually tell what you’re listening to unless it’s music you already know. For starters, the Stem Player fails at being even a half-decent music player. There are currently three West albums that are natively available for the player ( Donda 2, Donda, and Jesus Is King), and you can also use the Stem Player’s website to upload tracks from your own music library to be split into stems and transferred to your device. The Stem Player allows you to (re)mix your downloaded music as you’re listening to it, with four tracks of audio (“stems,” in technical parlance) that correspond to bass, drums, vocals, and non-rhythm-section instrumentation.
#Yeezy stem player portable#
(Again: I’m in my 40s.) West’s latest album, Donda 2, the sequel to last year’s Donda, can currently only be heard by purchasing a $200 Stem Player, a portable music player–slash–mixing board that West designed with the help of a company called Kano. The “ Sunday Services” rolling out an underwhelming gospel album, the trolling collaborations with disgraced artists, the listening sessions in football stadiums: They all leave the artist looking like someone who’s bereft of ideas but still desperate to be told how creative he is.Īll of this is to set the stage for West’s latest adventure, which may be the most bizarre release from a major artist that I can remember. As his music has become less vital, West has become increasingly drawn to gimmicks and spectacle for gimmicky spectacle’s sake. Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.īut maybe more than any musician of his stature in recent history, West (who now goes by the mononym “Ye”) seems addicted to fame-the sort that accrues from spending over a decade being touted as the greatest artist of your generation, in particular.
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