Stem
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More commonly, a "stem" is a subset of a mix, for example: within a television commercial's soundtrack there will by synchronous dialog, Announcer voice, foley, sound effects, and music. If these parts are split up into separate files for delivery to a mix studio, they are referred to as 'stems.' A Digital Audio Tape containing stems of a given commercial will include one recording of just the dialog, one recording of the Announcer, one of foley, one of sound effects, and one of music. These will generally each be preceded by a synchronization "pop" or "beep," generally a single frame of 1kHz tone two seconds prior to the beginning of the commercial. This is commonly called a "two-pop", since it is exactly two seconds before start of picture. Using this beep, the stems can be aligned in a DAW for mixing. Stems can also be applied to a music track; for example, let's say you have a rock band track. You can have a full mix (as reference), then stems of bass, guitars, keyboards, drums, brass, or whatever different instruments are incorporated in the music track. This gives the mixer various components so that if a particular part of an instrument may be clashing with any other elements, the mixer has the freedom to mute or lower levels of a particular stem.
