Hi everyone,

I gig with several bands, now running Stage Traxx 4, and song prep is a standing part of my working week! Over the last year I have built a desktop app for that side of things: everything that happens to a song before it is ready to play on stage. Reading this forum it is clear most of us have some version of the same pipeline, a DAW project for clicks and count-ins, files renamed by hand so the buses line up, MIDI tags typed out character by character, lyrics tapped in on the third attempt. TraxxTool is that whole pipeline in one purpose-built app.

It is at traxxtool.app. Windows, Mac and Linux, and the core is free.

What it covers, roughly in the order a song moves through it:

Getting the stems. A downloader pulls multitracks straight into organised, properly named projects and remembers everything you already own / downloaded. Direct links and Google Drive are built in, and the plugin system supports external sources: there is a compatible third party plugin for fetching your Karaoke Version purchases. If you remember the old bulk download scripts, that is the same idea without the command line fights. Stems bounced at different lengths get end-aligned automatically, and a count-in ahead of bar 1 is treated as pre-roll so nothing drifts.

Names and buses, once, not 900 times. Each stem gets a role (drums, bass, click, cues...) read from its filename, with a tidy-up pass for the messy ones and a dropdown for the rest. Bus routing is a preset you save and apply across the whole library, and exports carry the track names, colours and bus assignments inside the file, so there is no renaming gymnastics to make the import behave. If you are facing a big migration, this is days of tapping reduced to an afternoon.

Count-ins, clicks and cues. Add or remove a count-in bar with one button. If a song has no click, it synthesises one; if the click drifts, tempo detection plus normalise locks it to a real grid; if the click and drums disagree, Align Click snaps them together. Guide cues ("2, 3, 4", "Chorus", "Big finish") are spoken into your in-ears: record the cue set once in your own voice, free, and it is reused in every song, or pick an AI voice. Anything missing is generated automatically at export, and no marker ever ships silent.

Intuitive MIDI. Markers sit on the waveform as draggable flags: nudge them fine or coarse, snap them to click transients, and have one marker fire several commands at once. There are currently profiles and accompanying plugins for HeadRush (it mirrors your rig list and can build one-tap multi-block combos) and Behringer X Air (it fetches your channel names off the desk, so a marker says "Kick fader", not "CC 32"), plus named generic MIDI for everything else. This is huge for me because you add actual events instead of writing out manual midi commands! TraxxTool writes the timecoded ST4 tags for you, and if you cut or warp the song afterwards, every timestamp moves with the edit. Direct DMX integration is not in yet, but it is on the roadmap: direct support for lighting software, starting with QLC+ and potentially others, but of course you could use generic midi to set up lighting if you wanted

Lyrics without the stopwatch. Auto-Sync transcribes the vocal stem, fetches the proper words, and aligns them line by line; you then drag any line that landed wrong on a map of the vocal, with a Stage Traxx style preview of exactly what will show on the device. There is a tap-along mode too, and offsets are handled in the editor rather than in your head.

Edits without a DAW. Cut a verse with clean crossfades, warp timing, change speed or pitch with live preview, and set trim and fades using the same fields Stage Traxx reads. It's designed to make sense exactly for backing track edits, so it's much more intuitive than general DAW editing and a lot quicker! Every stem has a channel strip with volume, pan and four-band EQ, and per song you decide whether speed, pitch and EQ are baked into the audio or left editable on Stage Traxx 4. What you hear in preview is what exports.

One export, every version. Because routing is role-based, "no drums tonight" is a bus mute on the night, not a second copy of the song. A Keep button protects a signature riff from the mute. You can also render stereo mixes (click and cues left, band right, or a straight reference mix) for in-ears and learning in the van, one song or the whole set at once.

Sharing the work. All the prep (markers, cuts, warp, mix, lyric timings) saves as a small audio-free chart. Hand it to a bandmate or publish it to the community browser; someone with the same stems applies it in seconds against their own copy, and it is fingerprinted so it either matches their audio exactly or says so. One person charts a song, every member benefits. Playlists become real ST4 set lists, Song Share export is free and unlimited, and Merge can add songs into an existing .st4b without touching the playlists and config already on your device.

And when there are no stems to buy, a built-in splitter separates a mixed track into six stems, locally on your machine, free. It will also detect an old hard-panned backing track and lift the click out onto its own channel.

A word on the AI bits. A handful of features use AI where it genuinely saves serious time: lyric transcription and sync, track naming cleanup, the generated guide voices, and cloud stem splitting on a fast GPU. All of it is totally optional, and if you already have your own accounts it is bring-your-own-key (OpenRouter or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and ElevenLabs for voices). If you would rather not juggle keys, there is a simple built-in credits system that covers the whole AI stack with nothing to set up, and a typical song costs a few cents. Nothing in the core workflow depends on any of it.

Full disclosure: I built it, so I am biased. The workbench is free and stays free, not a trial. Pro ($23.99 one-time) covers full backups, unlimited Merge and combined Reaper/Ableton set export, and cloud backup is a paid extra. Everything else above is in the free version.

I would really value this forum's feedback, especially from anyone mid-migration or deep in the MIDI tag mines. Tell me what is missing, and if something breaks, tell me even faster!

I did mention this to Peter many months ago but the scope has since snowballed a bit - hopefully this is OK to share!

Cheers,
Matt