De-Mixer

The De-Mixer is the panel where you carve up a song's audio into the audio tracks that drive the rest of the Creative Editor. Instead of reacting only to the song's full waveform, you can react separately to drums, bass, vocals, melody, specific frequency bands, or transient hits — and any of those can be referenced from the Rack View or from inside a node graph.

Audio Track Sources

Each audio track in the De-Mixer starts from one of these sources:

All — the full mix of the song.
Drums, Bass, Vocals, Melody — stem-isolated channels of the song, automatically extracted from the original audio.

You can add as many audio tracks as you need and rename them so they're easy to reference from the rest of the Creative Editor.

Audio Track Features

On top of choosing a source stem (or full waveform), each audio track can be refined further:

Frequency filter — narrow the track down to a specific frequency band. This is what lets you isolate a "Kick" out of the Drums stem, for example.
Headphone preview — solo the track in your headphones so you can dial in the filters by ear.
Level meter and chart — visualize the live output of the track so you can sanity-check what's actually feeding the rack. Clicking on an empty space on it will select it, which in turn shows the animation graph produced by that track in the preview chart at the top of the window.
Transients detection — Each Audio Track produces two animations: an audio amplitude version and a transients detection version. The latter emphasizes the percussive hits inside the track, which is helpful when you want a clean event signal rather than a continuous level.

Using Audio Tracks

Once an audio track exists in the De-Mixer, the rest of the Creative Editor can point at it:

In the Rack View, templates that expose an Audio Track picker on a track will let you pick from any of your De-Mixer tracks. Any animation picker will also include animations from your Audio Tracks, characterized by special icons.
In the Nodes Editors, an Animation node lets you access those Audio Track animations for even more detailed processing.

Audio Track picker on a Rack View track, listing the De-Mixer tracks (Bass, Hi Freq Drums, Kick, Waveform, plus their Transients variants)

This is the mechanism that makes templates stem-aware: the same template can produce very different results depending on which audio tracks you route into it.