Getting audio out of a modular system has always been the unglamorous problem. The patch is eight interesting things happening at once; the recording is a stereo bounce in which those eight things have already been irreversibly summed. The usual fixes — an audio interface with enough inputs, a laptop, a rack of cabling — undo most of what people like about working on a modular in the first place.
ALM’s Stem Ripper addresses that in 8HP, and its new With Mixer expansion addresses what comes next.
Stem Ripper
Eight channels of multitrack audio recorded as WAV files directly to SD card, at up to 48kHz/32-bit, with automatic date-stamped filenames. Cards up to 1TB are supported and a 64GB card is included.
32-bit is the specification that matters most in a modular context. Eurorack levels are notoriously inconsistent between modules, and 32-bit float recording is effectively immune to clipping — you can capture a hot output and pull it back later without having destroyed anything. That removes most of the reason to babysit gain staging mid-patch. There are headroom and clip indicators anyway.
The workflow this enables is the obvious one and it’s genuinely new at this size: patch, hit record, walk away, and end up with eight separate stems on a card that you can drag into a DAW and mix properly later — instead of a single stereo file of a performance you can no longer take apart.
With Mixer
The 6HP expansion turns those eight channels into a proper mixer: full eight-channel stereo mixing with metering, save and recall, a graphical display, and three CV inputs expandable to seven.
The interesting port is USB-C MIDI host, which lets the module accept an external controller directly — ALM specifically cites Novation’s Launch Control XL MK3. That’s a knob-per-channel surface driving a 6HP module, which is a sensible answer to the perennial Eurorack tradeoff between panel space and hands-on control. You keep the rack narrow and put the controls on the desk.
A separate 2HP Thru Expander duplicates the eight inputs to eight unbuffered outputs, for anyone who wants to record and simultaneously route the same signals elsewhere.
The economics
14HP for eight-track recording plus recallable eight-channel mixing is a meaningful amount of function for the space, and cheaper than the alternatives it replaces — a large performance mixer, or an interface-plus-computer setup. All three modules are in stock at Perfect Circuit.