stemdeckapp/stemdeck

[!IMPORTANT]
macOS first launch (no code signing yet). After dragging StemDeck to Applications, clear the Gatekeeper quarantine flag or macOS will say the app is damaged:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/StemDeck.app

Optional: start from a clean slate. To reproduce a true first-run experience, open each path in Finder via the Go menu, then Go to Folder (Shift+Cmd+G), and move the folders to Trash:

• ~/Library/Application Support/StemDeck
• ~/Library/WebKit/app.stemdeck.desktop
• ~/Library/Caches/stemdeck
• ~/Library/Caches/app.stemdeck.desktop

You can also delete ~/Library/Preferences/app.stemdeck.desktop.plist the same way. This is optional; the app will work without it.

What's new in 0.8.0 Alpha 7

Faster playback: stems stream instead of preloading

Opening a track used to download and fully decode every stem before playback could start. For a 5-minute song that is hundreds of MB and a noticeable wait.

• The desktop player now streams each stem in 5-second windows over HTTP range requests and starts playing after the first chunk, instead of waiting for the whole file. Playback begins in about a second, and memory use drops sharply (it no longer holds every decoded stem in RAM at once).
• This is the same streaming engine the mobile player already used. The desktop loop, VU meters, waveforms, and energy bars were updated to work on the streaming path (waveforms and energy now come from the precomputed peaks, VU from live analysers).
• Long tracks that previously fell back to a choppier player now stream smoothly too, with no length cap.

We Recommend

• Added More Notes Less Talk (YouTube) to the We Recommend list.

Installing

• macOS: drop the .app into Applications and launch (run the xattr command above first).
• Windows: unzip the downloaded .zip, then run StemDeck.exe from the extracted folder.
• Linux: download the .tar.gz for your hardware, extract it, and run ./StemDeck. Install the WebKitGTK + GTK runtime prerequisites first (FFmpeg is fetched automatically on first launch):

  sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 libgtk-3-0
  

  The NVIDIA build additionally needs a working NVIDIA driver such that nvidia-smi reports your GPU (the CUDA runtime itself is bundled -- no separate CUDA toolkit install needed). If you have no NVIDIA GPU, use the CPU-only tarball.
• Docker / Unraid: install "StemDeck" from Unraid Community Applications, or pull ghcr.io/stemdeckapp/stemdeck:edge and map port 8000 plus the /app/jobs and /cache volumes. Add --runtime=nvidia for GPU acceleration. See the README for the full docker run command.

Artifact scan

• Windows portable packages (CPU + NVIDIA) scanned with ClamAV in CI before upload.
• Linux portable packages (CPU + NVIDIA) scanned with ClamAV in CI before upload.

Artifact build

• macOS arm64 and x64 DMGs and runtime packs built and inspected on a macOS runner before upload.
• Windows portable ZIPs (CPU + NVIDIA) built on a Windows runner.
• Linux portable tarballs (CPU + NVIDIA) built on a Linux runner.