Kanye West Launches Stem Player: Allows Users to ‘Customize’ Any ‘Donda’ Song

Ahead of his third listening event for Donda, Kanye West launched a $200 stem player, which allows users to “customize any song” from the album.

As mentioned on Kanye’s site, the Donda stem player means listeners can “control vocals, drums, bass, and samples” as well as “isolate parts, add effects, [and] split any song into stems.”

Image Courtesy: The Butler Collegian

Boasting lossless audio mixing, looping and speed control, and the ability to save and share customized mixes, the player will ship with the release of the new album. The speaker has a round shape and is made up of soft silicone blended skin. The Stem player has buttons to control the volume, a headphone jack, a USB-C port, speakers, a haptic engine, and 8GB of storage. While the device comes with a built-in 97DB speaker, the player can also connect to speakers through blue-tooth and its 3.5MM audio jack. It also supports a wide range of music formats: .AIFF, .AIF, .FLAC, .M4A, .MP3, .WAV, .WAVE, .AAC, .ALAC, and .MP

Image Courtesy: The Verge

According to The Verge, it seems like the Donda Stem Player could be a powerful music creation tool packed into a tiny device and it’s one that’s been rumored for a while: an alleged prototype of another West-affiliated stem player surfaced earlier this year and a leaked promotional video posted in March seemingly showed off the device.

The stem player is available to purchase right now, but the Donda album still doesn’t have a guaranteed release date. He’s set to play the record publicly for the third time this week on Thursday, Aug. 26 in Chicago, but it remains to be seen if it’ll actually arrive on streaming services after the event. Fans expected the album to drop after the past two events, but it failed to surface.

The Stem player was developed by West’s Yeezy Tech and electronics company Kano.

-Aditi