DAW ensemble

 

Averaging

 

The counterpart of avg ensemble from UVR (more) can also be made in a DAW (Audacity/Cakewalk/Reaper etc.). When you drag and align all stems you want to ensemble in your DAW, you simply need to lower the volume of stems according to the number of imported stems to ensemble.

It's -3 dB per one stem for replicating avg spec, so for a pair you need to decrease the volume of two stems by 6 dB (possibly by 6.02 as well).

 

So, when you add another stem (so for 3 models ensemble), you need to decrease the volume of all stems by 9dB, and so on.

 

The other way round, it's 3dB decrease for all stems every time you import a new track.

 

 

Weighting manually (the most precise)

 

You can change the volume of each ensembled stem to your liking, just to not cause clipping having too loud output on the master fader once you play. You can circumvent the problem to some extent using a limiter on the sum, but it might not be necessary.

Also, you can use different volume automation of stems towards specific verses and choruses, or just clip gain and also create different volume relation of stems whenever a new verse or chorus appears - so by dividing your song into specific section with different volume on each stem, and on those clips you can still use volume automation, so the volume rises gradually, or steep abruptly in specific place, or towards specific peaks.

 

Note: You won’t be able to use that method if one stem had phase rotated or flipped during excessive mix buss processing.

 

"I've made some tests by simply overlaying each audio above each other and reducing their volume proportionally of the number of audio overlays (like you would do in a DAW), it scores like ~0.0002 better SDR than UVR's average."

 

What If I have only a smartphone?

 

You can use Audacity online at wavacity.com, although it might crash occasionally while using on at least Android, or potentially with not much RAM.

Bandlab is more stable while using as a mobile app: https://www.bandlab.com/explore/home

but also crashes when used in PC mode online instead.

The app at least vertically doesn’t show the master fader, so you cannot control the output volume meter. Probably the same in horizontal screen view. Plus, the app doesn't give the possibility to adjust the gain precisely, e.g. to 9dB instead of -9,5dB, so to use single files with found gain values in Wavacity, to mix them without crashes, you can use the manual ensemble Colab.

 

If you want to just listen to stems offline, and change their volume, panning, solo, mute, you can download this html (by cypha_sarin) and run it locally in your browser.