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Recording the jam as stems

This is the reason Antiphon is a plugin at all.

Every other NINJAM client hands you a stereo mixdown of the room. Antiphon can give each remote player their own output bus, so your DAW records them as separate tracks -- editable, processable, mixable, like any other recording you made that day.

Routing players to their own tracks​

  1. Get into a jam.
  2. For each player you want separately: click Output bus: [+] to add a stereo bus, then set that player's channel to it in its dropdown.
  3. In your DAW, route Antiphon's extra outputs to tracks. How depends on the host -- in Reaper the plugin's extra output channels appear on the track and you route them onward; in Bitwig, use the plugin's multi-out.
  4. Record-arm those tracks and hit record.

Bus 1 is the main mix. Anything you leave on bus 1 stays there, so you can pull two people out onto their own tracks and leave the rest summed. You do not have to route everybody.

tip

Add the buses before you start recording. Adding one mid-take changes the plugin's I/O topology, and while Antiphon does tell the host about that, hosts vary in how gracefully they handle it.

Sending more than one channel yourself​

If you are playing guitar and singing, send them separately so the room can mix you properly.

  1. Input bus: [+] to add a second plugin input, and route your second source to it in the DAW.
  2. Channel: [+] to add a second strip.
  3. Set the new strip's Input bus dropdown to bus 2.
  4. Name them. "Guitar" and "Vox" beats "Channel 1" and "Channel 2" -- everyone in the room sees these names, and they are what people will use to mix you.
  5. Tick Mono on anything that is genuinely mono. It halves what you upload, which matters on a domestic connection.

Other players now see you as one card with two faders, and can turn your guitar down without turning your voice down.

A note on levels​

Remote channels default to 0.25, not unity. This matches the reference client, and it is deliberate: at unity you would be roughly 12 dB louder than everyone else expects. If a stem seems quiet on the track, that is why -- and it is the right place to fix it, on your own fader, rather than by making yourself louder to the room.

Recording the session outside the DAW​

Antiphon can also archive a session to disk itself, and there is an offline tool that turns that archive into WAV stems:

./build/tools/AntiphonStems_artefacts/AntiphonStems <session-dir> -o stems/

This is useful when you were not recording in a DAW at the time, or were running standalone. The stems come out aligned to interval boundaries and annotated with who played what.