Logic Pro: Exporting Stems With Track Stacks

The Bounce option is fine if you want to export a stereo mix of your entire project, but choosing the Export option can be much more flexible.

Track Stacks are your shortcut to quick and easy stem bouncing.

Let’s start with the basics. You’ve created a piece of music and you want to convert that into an audio file that’s playable outside of your DAW. Logic Pro calls this ‘bouncing’ a mix — a term taken from the days of tape, when it was common to send audio from a group of tape tracks to another tape track in order to free up the others, ping‑ponging audio around the tape machine before finalising to a stereo master. It describes what is essentially the same process today: taking multiple tracks and squeezing them into a single stereo file.

The other option is to ‘export’ audio. Many DAWs (and certainly Logic Pro) tend to see this in terms of exporting a single track or clip from a session. In fact, we can easily use the export process as a faster and better way to get full mixes and stems out of our project — with a little bit of setting up.

Bouncing Back

If you go to File / Bounce / Project or Section, the default settings here will bounce everything that currently plays and is active in that session within the boundary you’ve created on your timeline — that’s the yellow (or grey, if inactive) bar that runs along your timeline (Screen 1). For those starting out, PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation. The file types categorised as PCM are the ones that involve no lossy data compression, the WAV file format being the most common. The other options are data‑compressed, producing smaller files of lesser quality.

Now, for some of you this will be all you ever really need, but if you work in a professional environment, your sessions may have to be exported multiple ways, for example as stems. Stems are groups of tracks that are exported together, which combine to recreate your stereo mix. This allows for increased flexibility for other people working with your audio (a video editor, for example, might want to...