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. The worst thing I can say about the Stem Player is pretty much everything else I have to say about it. 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 MP3 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.
#YEEZY MP3 PLAYER PC#
However, PC Mag UK's Jordan Minor wasn't a fan of what he called the “unpleasant fleshy texture” of the Stem, but still called the player “an intriguing tool for creating and remixing music”, noting that tech like the Stem “lets total amateurs discover the joys of bending music to your will.”Įngadget's Terrence O'Brien was "somewhat disappointed by the Stem Player’s ability to handle non- Donda tracks", noting that “fairly stripped-down hip hop productions will do ok, but as the complexity of a song increases the Stem Player starts to struggle parsing the different parts.” He did conclude, however, that “eing able to quickly loop a chunk of music, reverse and slap some reverb on it is kinda fun.Send me updates about Slate special offers.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. Writing for The Verge, Jay Peters remarked on the soft feel of the Stem, which “makes it stand out from the many other metal and plastic gadgets I interact with every day.” While he hadn't felt the urge to listen to an entire album via Stem, he noted how fun it was to play with, and that “for someone who likes to make their own music, the Stem Player could be a mind-blowingly awesome tool.”
While interest in the Stem Player has shot up since the announcement (we're writing this piece, after all), the Stem Player has been out since August 2021, and the reviews have been filed online, waiting for this very moment. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
0 kommentar(er)
