Digital Home Thoughts: StackTraxx Royalty-Free Audio from Digital Juice

StackTraxx is a royalty-free music product from Digital Juice aimed at professionals who need the ability to quickly find the right type of background audio for their projects. Priced at $249 USD per volume, this product isn't something you'd use for your home videos, but for the right type of project, it's a lifesaver. The words "royalty free" are very important here, because many online services that sell background audio tracks have limited use rights, meaning you buy the right to use the audio track on a DVD, but when you want to put that online, you may have to pay for a new set of rights. I took a look at StackTraxx Volume 12: Corporate Stacks, a package aimed at (you guessed it) the corporate marketing world. The packaging exudes quality – the two CDs and one DVD fit in a hard cardboard and fabric sleeve, which then fits inside a cardboard case.

The two CDs (playable on regular CD players) contain all 25 songs, with each song offered in five different cuts: full-length, 60 seconds, 30 seconds, 15 seconds, and 10 seconds. The cuts allow you to quickly select the right length for your project, if the default track is what you're looking for. If not, this is where StackTraxx really shines: the DVD contains all of the tracks, each with between four and seven layers that can be individually turned off and on via the Juicer 3 processing software. Like the smooth jazz guitar on one track, but wish it didn't have the horns? You can easily remove the horn layer and export the track. Juicer 3 allows you to quickly search tracks by categories and key words (great for when you have a large collection), preview with the integrated player, and is skinnable [image]. The batch export is powerful, supporting WAV and AIFF files with sampling rates from 8 kHz to 96 kHz, bit depths of 8/16/24, and allowing for stereo or mono tracks. This is great to see, because it saves you having to manipulate the track further in a separate program.

So what about the actual content on Volume 12 that I looked at? In a word: exceptional. I'm not a corporate video producer, but thinking about the types of music I've heard in such productions, this music fits right in. There's a good variety of upbeat tracks, and several more mellow ones. Make no mistake though: they're all very corporate-sounding (hence the package name), so the styles don't work well for product reviews for instance. Being able to strip back individual layers within a track gives you huge variety for tweaking tracks just the way you want. Here's the four-layer version of a 10-second track called Industrial Growth, and here's the two-layer version. Quite different sounding!

If I have any criticisms for this offering, it's that it's a bit technically buggy and has some rough edges. For instance, it's a bit odd that the DVD doesn't come with a copy of the Juicer software required in order to use tracks - it's a free download from Digital Juice, but what if I was using the product and didn't have Internet access in my location? It seems silly for them not to include the software on the DVD. Regardless, it was a quick 10 MB download for me. The bigger problem was that on my testing computer, which has nothing installed but a fully updated install of Windows XP Professional, I was unable to get any audio previews to function. The only way for me to listen to the audio tracks was to drag the track to the Batch List, double click on it, and then listen. It didn't matter if I had Autoplay turned off or on. When I double-clicked on a track, the integrated audio player would go from play to pause to play quickly, but nothing else would happen. Obviously, this bug greatly slows down the interaction with the product and I hope it's something Digital Juice can fix in an updated version of the software. The fonts inside the Juicer software were also fuzzy and difficult to read - I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a "cool" effect, but it looks quite bad. Lastly, when I was in batch mode and looking at a track, if I clicked Effects > Merge, it would give me an error about inserting the DVD StackTraxx Volume 12, but that disc was already in the drive. Given the professional nature of this product, it's surprising the Juicer software client isn't more stable and polished.

All in all, StackTraxx is a strong solution from Digital Juice - if you're a professional video producer, or a serious amateur looking to up your game, this product is certainly a worthwhile tool to have in your arsenal.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He wishes he could spend more time creating music.