Changelog

3.6.1

A new way to update. DropWave looks for a new version every time it opens and every few hours while it runs, downloads it with a progress bar in the sidebar, then asks once: Restart.

• What's New: after an update, a window over DropWave shows what changed, once. While an update waits, What's New on its card shows it before you restart.
• A new icon: the blue wave from this website, on Apple's rounded square.
• Open Beta: the beta is open to everyone, and DropWave now says so in Settings and in its updates.

3.6.0

No beta key. DropWave opens straight away for everyone, free during the beta. The Discord stays for the community, support and early builds, but you don't need it.

• DropWave Manager (Settings → Manager, or DropWave → DropWave Manager…, ⇧⌘M) puts your licence, this Mac and the plugins in one place. When the beta ends, that's where you enter your key.
• Help → Send Feedback… sends us a note, with a log if you like, without the Discord.
• DropWave Editor and DropWave Tune 0.2.0 keep their licence current by themselves, so using any DropWave product online now and then keeps all of them working.

DropWave for Windows 3.6.0 needs no beta key either, and gets the Mac app's look and its studio tools: loudness range, the loudest moments, PLR, the delivery check, and the Loudness and Delivery panels beside Key & Tempo. Match loudness plays every file at the same level through the output device you pick, and the table has a Sort menu and nine columns. Every file is read again once, because DropWave now reads more than before.

3.5.0

The plug-in manager. Settings → Plug-ins (also DropWave → Plug-ins…) installs DropWave Tune, DropWave Editor and the Editor's stem model, shows what's installed, and keeps them up to date in the background. The plugins →

• A download picks up where it stopped if the connection drops, and every plugin is checked against DropWave's signature before it's installed.
• An update to a plugin your DAW has open waits until the DAW quits, so nothing changes under an open project.
• DropWave itself is much smaller to download and update (about 3.8 MB): the plugins now come only when you install them.
• Plugins installed from 3.4.4 or 3.4.5 are picked up and kept up to date from now on.

3.4.5

Runs on macOS 14 Sonoma and later, on a Mac with Apple silicon.

DropWave Editor and DropWave Tune come with the app. DropWave → Install DropWave Tune… or Install DropWave Editor… puts them in your plug-ins as AU, VST3 and CLAP. Splitting into stems in the Editor needs macOS 15 or later. The plugins →

DropWave Tune: you pick the key and scale, or press Detect for a suggestion (put the beat on Tune's side chain and Detect hears that too). Note transition and Expression knobs, and MIDI notes as targets.

Fixed: clicking another song while one played could close DropWave, when the two had different sample rates, like 44.1 and 48 kHz.

3.4.4 (Dev Beta)

Two plugins, in the Dev Beta for Mac.

DropWave Editor, installed with DropWave → Install DropWave Editor… as AU, VST3 and CLAP, with the stem model it needs. It hears a song once, splits it into vocals, drums, bass and other on your Mac, and plays it back as a stem mix you can mix, move to another key and master, live in your DAW. Splitting needs macOS 15 or later. More →

DropWave Tune, installed with DropWave → Install DropWave Tune…: real-time pitch correction for a vocal. You pick the key and scale, and Detect listens and suggests one, hearing the beat too when it's on Tune's side chain. With no key picked, only notes close to a semitone are corrected. Note transition and Expression knobs, MIDI notes as targets, and a new look. More →

Used Tune in a Logic project before? Insert it again: Logic now lists it as a MIDI-controlled effect.

3.4.1

Fixed: switching to the table could freeze DropWave and then close it on macOS 27.

Smoother switching between a file and the table: the sidebar slides away first, then the table fades in at full width. Table cells no longer show hover tips; a file's own view has every detail.

3.4.0

A file's readings fit on one page. The five numbers in one row, then key & tempo, loudness and delivery side by side, no scrolling.

Drop a folder and it opens in the table, with Sort and one-click CSV to Downloads on one bar.

Shortcuts. ⌘F to search, and search by tempo ("128"); ⌘↓ / ⌘↑ for the next or previous file; Help → Keyboard Shortcuts (⌘/).

First run: drop files on the key screen, and a pasted key checks itself.

Smoother: quicker view switches, steadier rows while files are analysed, no more freeze when playing an unusual file. Fixed: quitting on the key screen could forget your saved list.

3.3.0

Notarised by Apple. DropWave now opens straight away on any supported Mac, without the Open Anyway step. (3.3 came to Windows in 3.6.0, PDF reports aside.)

Mastering-grade loudness. Loudness range (LRA), short-term and momentary max, PLR, sample peak and stereo correlation, on a ruler with the −14 LUFS streaming level and the −1 dBTP ceiling, plus loudness over time.

What streaming does with your track. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music, Tidal and Deezer, and how far each turns it down.

Delivery check. Every file against a spec, Streaming master by default (44.1 kHz or more, lossless 16 or 24-bit, true peak at or under −1 dBTP, no clipping, no long silence at either end). Edit it in Settings → Delivery.

Tempo changes. Songs that change tempo show each stretch with its own BPM and beat grid, like key changes.

Studio playback. Play through your audio interface, Match loudness to compare files at the same level, ← / → a bar back or forward, Return to the start.

PDF reports of one file or the whole list, to send to a label, artist or client (File → Export PDF Report…, ⇧⌘E).

New table columns: Range, Format and Delivery; right-click a column title for PLR or Tuning. CSV exports carry the new measurements.

3.2.0

Now on Windows. DropWave for Windows 11 joins the beta: the same app and the same readings, in Windows' own look. One download that installs itself, updates in the background like on a Mac, and Explorer's right-click menu has Analyse with DropWave.

DropWave remembers your files. Open it and your list is back, instantly: files it has read before don't wait to be read again, and a file is only read again when it changes. A file that moved or was renamed is followed; one that's gone shows as Missing, with Locate….

Back to a clean start, with the × beside the file count. ⌘Z brings the list back, and Remove from List undoes too.

Analyse from Finder. Right-click files or a folder → Analyse with DropWave, or drop them on DropWave in the Dock.

Progress on the Dock icon, and a notification when a big folder finishes while you're in another app.

Calmer. Readings land in place instead of the page rebuilding, moving between files keeps everything still, ↑ / ↓ go through your files, and Space keeps playing as you move.

Key changes that come back home, such as a lift to another key and back, are read right.

Files that can't be read say why: not an audio file, damaged, copy-protected, or a format macOS can't decode.

After updating from 3.1, paste your beta key once more: DropWave keeps it in a new place now.

3.1.0

A new key engine. DropWave now listens for the notes actually being played, bass line included, instead of judging the overall colour of the sound. It lands a fifth away from the real key far less often. More →

Key changes. When a song modulates, a strip under the waveform shows each section's key and where it starts.

The beat grid, drawn on the waveform, with the first beat of every bar marked.

Check it by ear. Click on beats plays a metronome locked to the detected grid, along with the track. Hear key plays the key's chord, tuned to the track.

Half / As detected / Double for every track, used in the table, the file names and the export.

Search in the toolbar, in both views: name, key or Camelot code.

Smoother. Switching between one file and the table no longer jumps, Space plays and pauses from launch, and the window is more compact.

3.0.2

Restart asks first, installs the update, and reopens DropWave with the files you had open.

3.0.1

The update bar floats in the window when there's no sidebar, and What's new shows the full notes.

3.0.0

DropWave V2. Rebuilt from scratch as a native app for macOS 26 or later: key and Camelot, tempo to two decimal places, tuning, loudness and true peak, each with confidence and a runner-up; the Camelot wheel; whole folders in a sortable table with CSV export and undoable filename tagging; playback; and updates that download in the background and install when you click Restart.

# DropWave 2

2.1.5

The confidence bands mean something now, and they are the headline because they were the one thing in DropWave nobody could stand behind.

They are counted, not calculated. Until now the band came out of a formula that weighed a winning score against a runner-up. It was reasonable and it was never measured, and the docs said so in as many words. DropWave now reads your file many times over instead of once — different parts of it, weighed up in different ways — and the band is simply how many of those readings agreed. Under each one it prints the count: 37 of 39 looks agreed. That is a fact about your file rather than a number you have to take on faith.

They were checked against real music, and they hold. A track played faster is a track in a known different key at a known different tempo — so a reading can be tested on ordinary music without anybody having to label it first. Over eight hundred real tracks, readings marked High followed that shift far more often than readings marked Medium or Unsure, and the band edges were set from where the measurements actually separate rather than from where they looked right.

Treat Medium as no opinion is unchanged advice — but for tempo it is now the measured advice rather than the cautious one. On tempo, Medium and Unsure came out close enough together that only High is doing real work, and pretending otherwise would be the same mistake this release exists to fix.

Everything got faster anyway. Reading a file well over a hundred times instead of once costs nothing: the tempo stage was spending most of its time clearing a scratch buffer it did not need to clear. Analysis is still about 40 ms per file.

The tempo reading is franker about half-time. When every disagreement about a tempo is really a disagreement about metrical level — 87 against 174 — the plugin says so and names both, instead of reporting the pulse as unsure.

The plugin shows you what it is hearing. While the transport runs there is now a live trace of the signal actually arriving on that channel, and the middle of the Camelot wheel counts up the audio captured so far. Inserting it on the wrong bus used to look exactly like inserting it on the right one until the reading came back.

2.1.4

Downloading is gone, the plugin has been rebuilt, and a folder of files is now something you can actually work from.

The Download tab has been removed. DropWave is an analyzer for files you already have.

Three things follow from that, and they are the reason it is worth the loss:

• DropWave is 6.2 MB, down from 43 MB. The download helper was 36 MB of the app you were installing to read a key.
• Nothing in DropWave connects to the internet. The strong version of that sentence — the one this site made through 2.1.1 and had to narrow in 2.1.2 — is true again. It is also no longer just a promise: neither the app nor the plugin carries permission to open a connection, so macOS refuses on their behalf.
• The plugin cannot reach your files either. It had read-write access to one folder, for downloads. That is gone. It reads the audio the host hands it and can do nothing else.

The plugin has been rebuilt. It is a wider, darker panel with its own look rather than one borrowed from whatever your system accent colour happens to be, and the layout no longer rearranges itself twice on the way to an answer: the wheel sits in the same place from the moment the window opens and simply lights up when there is a key. It now shows the confidence band on the key as well as the tempo, prints tempo to two decimal places, names the three codes that mix with yours, and draws how full the two-minute capture buffer is. Nothing changed in what it hears — same key, same tempo, same engine.

A folder is now a table you can work from. Dropping a pack already gave you a list in 2.1.3; it now gives you loudness and true peak per file alongside key, Camelot and tempo, and you can sort by any column — the Camelot column sorts round the wheel (1A, 1B, 2A …) rather than alphabetically, so neighbouring keys land next to each other — filter it, and export it as a CSV file as well as to the clipboard. Both exports write exactly what the table is showing.

And it can write the key and tempo into your filenames. Rename… shows you every change before it moves anything, skips files that already carry the tag, and refuses any rename that would overwrite something. Running it twice replaces the tag rather than adding a second one. It renames only — it never opens the audio.

A folder is read about 3.7× faster. Files are now read four at a time rather than one. The old code said concurrency would not help because analysis is limited by memory rather than by cores; timed over 504 files that turned out to be half right — four at a time is 3.7× quicker for the same total CPU, while eight at a time really is slower, which is what the original note had in mind. Four is also the number that keeps memory sane, since a decoded eight-minute stereo file is well over 100 MB.

And it tells you how long it will take. A bar and a time, both weighted by file size rather than file count — a pack of four hundred one-shots and six long stems does not progress evenly, and a bar that races to 90% and then stops is worse than none. The estimate stays quiet until it has read enough to be worth printing, and it says what the run actually took when it finishes.

Fixed: closing a file from a run threw the whole run away. Clicking a row to look at one file and then closing it called the same "start again" that the drop zone does, so the table you were reading a second ago was gone and four hundred files had to be read again. Closing a file opened from a run now returns to the run. Ending a run is its own deliberate act, and it asks first.

Fixed: a capped run invented a number. A drop of more than five hundred files said "501 files — reading the first 500" whether you had dropped 501 or nine thousand, because the walk stops one past the cap. It now says "more than 500".

Still don't trust the confidence bands. Not calibrated; "Medium" means "no opinion". That has not changed and is the next thing being worked on.

2.1.3

A folder at a time. Drop a folder, or several files, and DropWave reads them in turn into a table — file, key, Camelot, tempo — that fills top to bottom as it goes. Any row opens the full reading, and Copy table puts the lot on the clipboard as tab-separated text a spreadsheet will open. Nested folders are walked, so a sample pack organised by instrument works as dropped. Nothing is written to your files. Before this, a multi-file drop analysed the first and apologised for the rest.

2.1.2

The plugin no longer has an Analyze button. It works the key and tempo out on its own: the first reading appears after about eight seconds of audio and sharpens as you keep playing. The old two-minute progress bar was the size of a buffer, not a requirement, and everyone reasonably read it as one. More →

Fixed: the plugin captured silence. Most DAWs push silence through every insert while the transport is stopped, and the plugin kept all of it. Leave it open on a paused session and the buffer filled with digital zero while the readout said it had everything it needed — which is the single biggest reason the plugin could sit there and tell you nothing useful. Silence is now ignored entirely.

The plugin hears a track in pieces. Play the intro, jump to the drop, play that, and those count as two independent looks at the material rather than one stretch with a splice through the middle — the same thing DropWave does to a file, where it takes three windows from three places in the arrangement. The reading says what it is standing on: "24 s from 2 regions".

The plugin asks before it listens. Nothing is captured until you say yes, enforced where the audio arrives rather than in the window.

2.1.1

The plugin. DropWave now runs inside your DAW. DropWave Analyzer ships inside the app — launch it once and the plugin is installed — and reads whichever channel you insert it on. Press Analyze and it reports the key, the Camelot position and, where there is a pulse to find, the tempo. It passes audio through untouched. More →

The Camelot wheel is drawn in the result. All 24 positions as a ring, your key filled, the three keys that mix with it lit in place. Previously the result carried the code alone.

Files with no extension open. Analysis used to be refused before the file was ever looked at, so a bounce straight out of a DAW could be turned away. What decodes now decides what decodes.

Multi-file drops say what they did. Dropping twelve files used to analyse one with no sign the other eleven existed. It now says "Analysing 1 of 12".

Playback no longer swallows the Space key when there is no file loaded.

Finder's Open With now offers DropWave for video files, which had always worked when dragged in.

2.0

Rebuilt native. DropWave 2 shares no code with version 1. It went from around 200 MB with a pile of dependencies to a few megabytes with none, and from a cold start you could feel to a result that is there before you let go of the mouse.

Six readings instead of eleven. A spectral centroid, a sample rate Finder already shows, and an "energy" score on a made-up scale all came out. What went in was true peak in dBTP and loudness in LUFS, both to ITU‑R BS.1770‑4 — real units, defined by a published standard, comparable against anything else that implements it.

Confidence bands, with the alternative named when a call was close.

Tuning measured rather than assumed, and reported in cents — so detuned and pitch-shifted material resolves correctly.

Tempo to two decimal places.