You built the track. Drums programmed, bass written, chords, lead, vocal recorded, arrangement done. Then you bounced it, played it next to a release in the same genre, and it sounded small. Every forum will now tell you to learn mixing. Buy the plugins, watch the tutorials, spend a year on EQ theory.
You do not have to. Producing and mixing are two different jobs. Plenty of producers with hits never mix their own records. What you need is to hand your production over in a shape a mixer can work with, and that takes an evening, not a year.
Keep the sound, drop the fixes
The one decision that matters before export: which processing stays in the stems and which comes out.
Keep everything that is part of the sound. The distortion on the bass, the sidechain pump on the pad that is a rhythmic element, the delay throws on the vocal, the bitcrusher on the drum loop, the filter sweep in the breakdown. Those are production decisions and they belong in the files. Print them.
Take out everything that was there to fix balance. The compressor on the master bus. The limiter you put on the output so the bounce would be loud. The EQ you added because the vocal was fighting the synth. The reverb send you turned up because the mix sounded dry. All of those are mix decisions made by ear in a room with no reference, and they get in the way of a mix made properly. Bypass them, or better, delete them from the project copy you export from.
If you cannot tell which category an effect is in, ask: would the song be a different song without it? If yes, keep it. If it just makes the bounce sound better, remove it.
Export by role, not by track
A production session has forty tracks. A mix does not need forty stems, it needs one per musical role. Group before you export.
For a typical electronic or pop production that is roughly: kick, snare and claps, hats and cymbals, other percussion, bass, chords or pads, lead synth, lead vocal, backing vocals, and effects like risers and impacts. Eight to fourteen files. Three synth layers playing the same chord part become one stem. Six hi-hat variations become one stem. The lead vocal stays alone, always. How Many Stems for Mixing? gives the full grouping logic and real counts.
Then export. Every file the same length, starting at bar one, WAV at your session's sample rate, 24 bit. No normalizing. The step-by-step menus for each DAW are in How to Export Stems in Logic, Ableton, FL Studio, Reaper and GarageBand.
Two producer-specific traps. In Ableton, "Export All Individual Tracks" exports return tracks too, so your reverb returns come out as their own files; delete those or you will upload the wet reverb as a stem. In FL Studio, anything routed to the master rather than a mixer insert ends up in no stem at all, so check that every channel is assigned to a mixer track first.
Leave the headroom alone
Your stems should peak somewhere around -6 dB and your session master should have nothing on it. If the master bus limiter was doing 6 dB of gain reduction in your bounce, the stems will sound quieter and less exciting when you play them back raw. That is correct. Loudness is the last step and it belongs to mastering, which needs the room to work. How Much Headroom to Leave Before Mastering explains why a loud stem is a worse stem.
Upload, label, pick the genre
In Bandmixr each file gets a label: Kick, Snare, Hihat, Bass Synth, Synth Pad, Synth Lead, Vocal Lead, Vocal Backing and so on. The labels are how the engine knows what role each file plays, so take a minute here; a pad labeled as a lead will be treated like a lead.
Then the genre. Electronic, Pop and Hip Hop each set a different target for the low end, the amount of compression, how dry the vocal sits and how loud the master lands. If your track sits between two styles, run it both ways; the preview is free and the difference is instructive.
The engine balances the stems, EQs and pans each one, resolves the clashes between kick and bass and between vocal and synths, and masters to the preset you choose. Then use the fine-tune faders if the lead needs another decibel, and A/B against your original bounce at the same volume.
If the bounce already sounds right
Sometimes the answer is that your rough mix was fine and it only needed loudness. In that case skip the stems: upload the stereo bounce, without the limiter, and master it. Streaming at -14 LUFS for Spotify and Apple, Standard at -11, Loud at -8 for a DJ set or a demo that needs to hit. Pick Your Master Loudness explains which one you want.
The way to find out which case you are in: do both. Master the bounce, mix the stems, listen at matched volume. If the stems version is only slightly better, you are secretly a decent mixer. If it is embarrassingly better, you just found the year you did not have to spend.
Both tests are free at bandmixr.com, and the first download is too.