I'm Michael Edwards. I've spent more than 25 years writing and producing music — film, TV, advertising, records, artists and bands. Different rooms, different genres, same evening.
The mix is done. It's late. Then: can we get the stems?
You know exactly what the next two hours look like. Save a copy. Start cleaning. Group the drums — but not that aux, it's feeding the sidechain. Solo the strings, except the reverb's on a shared bus. Mute the click. Mute the limiter. Check nothing's doubled. Check the hidden track from two weeks ago isn't printing into the vocal. Bounce. Listen back. Find the mistake. Start again.
Nobody teaches this part and nobody bills for it. It's the tax at the end of every job. Across a career it isn't hours — it's years.
Stems were never just exporting tracks. They're arrangements: groupings with shared effects, parallel processing, sidechain dependencies and routing that made sense while you were building it. And everyone's session is organised differently, because the way you organise is part of how you write.
I tried to automate it. Keyboard Maestro, AppleScript, screen automation. Everything broke the same way: too much setup, too fragile to trust, too narrow for real sessions, and no way to verify the result. A tool you have to check by hand isn't saving you anything.
There was a second reason too. I've lost work — a plugin that went end-of-life, a subscription that lapsed, a format that stopped being a format. Stems are the insurance policy. And I don't archive as well as I should, for exactly the same reason I dread the client email.
I've been bouncing stems out of Logic for close to 20 years, so I never had to guess at what this thing should do. I wasn't designing a feature list. I was writing down a job I'd done by hand a thousand times: which aux you must not fold into the group, which reverb tail you lose the moment you solo something dry, which hidden track from three weeks ago is quietly printing into the vocal. Every rule in Bounce Buddy is a mistake I'd already made.
The hard part was teaching it to see a session the way I do. None of the shortcuts could, so I went to the source and reverse-engineered Logic's project file. That took hundreds of test sessions, each built to answer one question, and a long stretch of finding out I'd been wrong about something — the format isn't documented anywhere, so the only way to learn it is to keep asking until the answers stop contradicting each other.
Bounce Buddy reads it the way Logic does — all of it offline, only touching your open session to trigger the bounce. It ignores the residue every real session collects: hidden tracks, muted tracks, orphaned auxes, empty tracks. Then it shows your music the way you arranged it.
Slide the complexity slider and the granularity changes — Drums, or Kit / Perc / Hits, or Kick, Snare, OH, Tambourine — with solo, mute, effects and sidechain routing adapting at every level. Drag to combine, rename, promote. Shared processing is shown, not guessed at. Hit + for a full mix, + again for an instrumental.
It took far longer than I planned. But it cleared my Saturdays, so I'm sharing it.
Bounce Buddy is me. One person, no team behind it. That's worth saying plainly, because it's a fair thing to weigh up before you lean a delivery deadline on somebody's software.
So here's the commitment. If I ever stop working on Bounce Buddy — for any reason — the last build goes out without a licence check, and it stays downloadable. Nothing phones home. No activation to expire. Nothing that stops working because I did. What you've bought keeps running on the Logic you've got.
That isn't the plan. I use this on my own work every week, and it has to track Logic — when Apple ships an update I test against it and fix whatever moved. But you shouldn't have to take my word for that to spend money here.
No subscription, no fluff. Try it on a real session — the messy one. You'll know within a project or two.