stemdeckapp/stemdeck

Second alpha of StemDeck. This release adds a self-contained Windows desktop app with dual portable zip variants, and a round of DAW UI polish.

What's new

Windows desktop app

StemDeck is now available as a portable Windows app — no Python, no uv, no system dependencies. Extract and run StemDeck.exe.

Two variants ship with each release:

| Download | GPU | Approx. size |
| --- | --- | --- |
| StemDeck-Windows-x64.zip | CPU only | ~700 MB |
| StemDeck-Windows-x64.NVIDIA.zip | NVIDIA CUDA | ~1.6 GB |

Use the CPU variant if you don't have an NVIDIA GPU. AMD and Intel GPUs don't support CUDA — CPU is the right pick for those too.

On first launch the app runs a short setup sequence (runtime check, workspace creation, compute device detection, FFmpeg, Demucs model download). Subsequent launches skip most steps and start in seconds.

The bundled Python venv has C++ static libraries stripped out — dnnl.lib alone is 623 MB and is only needed at build time, never at runtime. This is what keeps the CPU zip under 700 MB despite bundling a full PyTorch install.

DAW UI improvements

Waveform lanes and the instrument icon column now expand to fill the full window height, with icons vertically centered in each row at any window size. A ResizeObserver on the wave container keeps the playhead height and multitrack layout in sync when the window is resized.

The play button now glows green when active and the stop button glows red. Help and Tip the maker links now open in the system default browser — previously they did nothing inside the desktop app. The GPU setup step was also renamed to "Configuring compute device" since it applies to both CPU and NVIDIA builds.

Bug fixes

Fixed mixer channels getting stuck after mute or volume adjustments (#7). Per-track volume is now clamped to the browser-safe 0..1 range and each setTrackVolume call is wrapped independently, so one bad fader value can no longer abort the whole mixer pass and leave other channels stale.

Setup (macOS / Linux)

Unchanged from alpha.1 — ./run.sh setup && ./run.sh start.

Known limitations

Same as alpha.1. The Windows app is ALPHA — expect rough edges.