How to Record Your OP-XY (and Why You Cannot Get Stems Over USB)

No. There is no multichannel USB output and no stem export. Sound on Sound put it plainly in their review: there is no way to export or bounce stems, and no multi-channel USB output. Whatever you connect, USB-C or the 3.5mm output, you get the stereo master with all your tracks summed.

This is not a firmware gap waiting to be filled either. The public changelog runs back to version 1.0.9 in November 2024 and up to 1.1.21 in July 2026, and not one release mentions USB audio, multichannel audio, stems or audio export. The 1.1.x updates added things like file structure, templates, sixteen patterns per track and a MIDI monitor. Nothing about getting more than two channels out.

This is worth understanding, because it explains why you keep finding contradictory advice, and it comes down to two phrases being misread.

The first is on Teenage Engineering's own spec sheet: usb audio host and device. People read host as meaning the OP-XY hosts your computer as a multichannel source. It means the opposite. The OP-XY can host an audio interface plugged into it, taking audio in.

The second is in TE's own guide, which says the OP-XY supports multi-channel interfaces and will by default select channels 1 and 2. Read out of context that sounds like multichannel output. In context it is describing which channels of an interface you are sampling from, and TE even documents the button presses: press sample, select usb as the input with the dark gray knob, then choose the channel with the mid gray knob. It is about audio coming in, not stems going out. That sentence is almost certainly the origin of the AI answers currently telling people to stream stems.

There is no setting to turn on. USB audio is automatic when you connect, which is why people hunt through menus for a switch that does not exist. Plug in a USB-C cable, select the OP-XY as the input device in your DAW, arm a stereo track and play.

On iOS it works, with one hard caveat: use a USB-C device. Owners report clean plug-and-play on iPhone 15 and later and on USB-C iPads, while Lightning connections are unreliable to broken, and an iPhone 12 threw a power-draw warning. If you are on an older phone, this is the wall you will hit, and no setting fixes it.

One honest gap worth knowing: Teenage Engineering does not publish a sample rate or bit depth for the USB stream anywhere in its documentation. A single review mentions 16-bit/44.1kHz, but that refers to the sampler rather than the USB output and we could not corroborate it. If your DAW asks, match whatever the OP-XY reports rather than assuming a number.

This is the most useful number in TE's specifications and almost nobody mentions it. The OP-XY's audio output is 2 Vrms, which is 8 dBu. That is hotter than consumer line level and hotter than nominal professional line level. Run it straight into a phone input or a modest interface with the gain where you would normally leave it and you will clip on the way in.

There is a second, sharper detail. The multi-out jack's audio is 1 Vrms, 2 dBu, exactly 6 dB quieter than the main output. If you record both at once, they arrive at noticeably different levels. This is documented in TE's own electrical specifications and it explains a mismatch people usually blame on their recorder.

There is a further trap on the USB path specifically: the audio leaves at full digital level, and the volume knob does not touch it. That knob is for the headphone and speaker output. To actually turn down what you are sending over USB you need the master section of the mixer, reached by pressing 4 under the display on the mixer screen. Owners discover this the hard way when a device downstream distorts and turning the obvious knob changes nothing. Note also TE's wording that the master level feeds an output limiter, so pushing it is a loudness decision rather than a clean trim, and the mix page shows no meter. Set your balance, leave headroom, and let your recorder tell you the truth.

Here is the genuinely useful thing that is buried in the manual. The multi-out jack is not just a second copy of your master. It is a per-track-assignable output.

Go to the auxiliary track, track 5, and press M2 to open the routing module. TE's guide is explicit that this is where you send instrument tracks out through the multi-out jack, and that only routed tracks will run out of the aux output. You can also set how much of each track goes there, independently of your main mix.

That means you can capture two independent submixes simultaneously: drums out the multi-out, everything else out the main output, into two inputs of your recorder. It is not stem export, but it halves the number of passes you need, and almost no one talks about it.

Three traps to save you an hour. First, the multi-out does not mirror your mix automatically. Set it to audio mode and plug in without routing anything and you will get silence, which is exactly what happens to people who then assume the jack is broken. Second, the multi-out mode is a single choice between midi, cv/gate, sync and audio, and TE states it cannot be changed while a cable is plugged in, so unplug, change mode, plug back in. Third, the send is post-fader: turning a routed track down in the main mixer also turns it down at the multi-out, so set your levels before you commit. Owners have also hit a conflict where the multi-out only behaves once the line-in on page 1 of aux track 5 is disabled, which is worth checking if you are also using a microphone.

Better still, and this is confirmed by owners who have reproduced it independently: routing a track to the aux output removes it from the main output. Not a duplicate, an actual move. So you get genuine separation rather than the same part bleeding into both recordings. The recipe people use is: set multi-out to audio in the com settings, go to aux track 5 and set its input to input, turn the white mix encoder on that page to zero, then press M2 and route the tracks you want. Turn a routed track's aux amount back down and you hear it fade out of the multi-out and back into the main output, which is a neat way to check it is working.

Record them one pass at a time. In mix, hold a track button to solo it, record that pass, then solo the next and record again. Hold shift and press a track button to mute instead, if you prefer working the other way round. The sequence plays identically each time, so passes should sit together, though it is worth saying plainly that we have not found anyone who has measured how tightly they align, and neither have we. Check one pair before you build a whole track on the assumption.

Combined with the multi-out routing above, this goes faster than it sounds: two parts per pass rather than one. For a typical arrangement you are looking at a few passes rather than an afternoon.

Two rules make the difference between usable stems and a pile of misaligned files. Start every pass from the very beginning, not from somewhere in the middle: the OP-XY sends a MIDI start rather than a continue, and owners report it sends no song position information, so anything slaved to it cannot locate itself to a bar. And do not touch the mixer between passes except the solo. Change a level halfway through and your stems will not sit together when you stack them.

If you are recording pass by pass you need somewhere to put the passes, and four tracks maps onto it neatly: drums on one, bass on another, and so on, building the arrangement back up as separate parts.

Reel is our four-track recorder for iPhone. It takes the OP-XY's USB output directly, records in 32-bit float so a hot output like this one will not clip on the way in, and lets you overdub pass by pass and then mix. A laptop DAW does the same job with more screen. The point is simply that a one-pass-at-a-time workflow needs a multitrack destination, and a phone is a small thing to carry to a rehearsal.

A handful of things that catch people out, gathered from owners rather than spec sheets.

• The internal speaker does not mute when you record over USB. Only the analog output does that. So you can be bleeding the speaker into a room mic without realising, or assume no signal is leaving because you can still hear it.
• USB ground noise is a real and repeated complaint, and there is a known fix: go to the com page and turn charging off. Several owners independently report this clears the hum when the OP-XY is connected to a computer or phone. Be aware the setting itself is flaky in some configurations, with owners reporting they cannot disable charging while certain devices are attached.
• Pops and clicks over USB audio still get reported on current phones, including an iPhone 16 Pro. Android fares worse, with choppy audio on a Pixel 7a and no audio at all on a Pixel 9. Separately, one owner chasing random audio dropouts found they appeared on the analog output but not over USB, which pointed at a hardware fault rather than firmware and ended in a warranty replacement. If you are about to track a whole piece in passes, record analog and USB together once first and compare.
• The clock page in system settings is the date and time clock, not MIDI clock. MIDI clock lives under midi settings. People genuinely hunt in the wrong menu for this.
• There is a MIDI monitor page showing incoming MIDI, channel, value, clock and sysex. It is the right tool for working out whether transport and clock are actually arriving, rather than guessing.
• MIDI in cannot be reconfigured as MIDI out, which is the wall people hit when they want an external effects loop.

The OP-XY makes a good clock master. Press play and it begins transmitting clock, and it can send and receive MIDI clock over USB, over the multi-out in MIDI mode, and over Bluetooth LE MIDI.

If you are recording alongside other gear, let the OP-XY drive, since it is holding the arrangement anyway, and set everything else to follow. Most timing trouble in a small setup comes from two devices both insisting on being the master. Pick one and the drift usually disappears.

You may come across tools like StemSeparator or LoopSeek described alongside the OP-XY and assume they pull stems out of it. They do the opposite. They separate stems from existing songs, or automate multisampling, so you can get material into the OP-XY more easily.

There is no third-party tool that extracts multitrack stems from an OP-XY, and there cannot be. Only a stereo mix leaves the machine, so no software downstream can unmix what the hardware already summed.