Three keystrokes
Press 2 for the Download tab, ⌘V to paste, Return.
A three-minute track takes about three seconds. It asks where to save while the transfer is still running, so choosing a folder costs you nothing — by the time most people have clicked Save the file is already down, and it goes straight into the analyzer afterwards.
There is nothing to install. Everything a download needs ships inside the app, which is why DropWave is 43 MB rather than under four.
Format
Four containers, and every one of them is written by macOS itself — which is why no encoder ships alongside the app.
- M4A is the default and costs nothing. The source is already AAC, so this is a rename rather than a re-encode: no quality is lost and no time is spent.
- WAV and AIFF are 24-bit PCM, for a sampler or a DAW that would rather not decode on the fly.
- FLAC is lossless compression — about half the size of WAV, identical on decode.
There is no MP3, and that is deliberate rather than an omission. macOS decodes MP3 and does not encode it, so offering it would mean shipping a second large binary to serve one row of a menu.
A word about the lossless formats: a WAV made from a streaming source is a lossless copy of a lossy stream. It is bit-exact from that point on, which is what a sampler wants, but it does not recover anything the upload discarded.
Quality
| Tier | What it asks for |
|---|---|
| Low | about 64 kbps — quickest, and enough to read a key off |
| Normal | about 128 kbps — the usual stream |
| High | the best AAC rendition the source has |
| Ultra | the best stream available, whatever the codec |
The ceiling is the upload, not the tier. There is no 320 kbps rendition sitting on a video host waiting for you to ask nicely, and Ultra cannot invent one — what the tiers actually decide is which of the renditions that do exist to take.
While a download runs, DropWave shows you what it picked — "AAC · 128 kbps" — so the setting is confirmed rather than taken on faith.
Low is genuinely useful. If you are pulling a track down to read its key and tempo, 64 kbps answers the question as well as 256 does and arrives sooner.
Why the tiers prefer AAC
Three of the four tiers reach for the AAC rendition before anything else, and it is worth knowing why: macOS decodes AAC and does not decode Opus in a WebM container. A download DropWave itself cannot open is not a successful download.
Ultra is the exception — it takes the best stream on offer whatever the codec, which on some sources is Opus. When that happens the file keeps its own extension and DropWave says plainly that macOS cannot play it, rather than handing you something named .m4a that will not open.
The file is still yours: it is saved, it is named honestly, and DropWave will show it in Finder or copy its path. It also offers to fetch the same link again at High, which is one click and guaranteed to give you something that plays. That offer is not taken automatically — the file that arrived is the best copy of that audio in existence, and downloading a track twice without asking is a surprise on a metered connection.
The honest naming is a bug fix. Through 2.1.1 the saved file was always named .m4a regardless of what had actually arrived, so a video with no AAC rendition produced a file that looked right, saved without complaint and then refused to play. Changelog →
In the plugin
The plugin has the same field. Paste a link on the channel you are working on and the audio comes down without leaving the session — then analyse it, play it out of that channel, reveal it in Finder or copy its path.
Files from the plugin land in ~/Music/DropWave, because a save dialog inside a plugin window inside a host window is a stack of modality nobody wants mid-session.
Format and quality are one setting across both. Choose FLAC in the app and the plugin is on FLAC too, without restarting anything. This is stated here because 2.1.2 claimed it and did not do it: a plugin runs sandboxed and was quietly keeping its own copy of the setting, so picking WAV in the app got you M4A on a channel.
What it will and will not fetch
DropWave asks the site for the audio track and nothing else. It does not download video, and it does not fetch playlists — a link that points into a playlist is treated as a link to that track.
The address as your browser gives it to you is fine. youtube.com/watch?v=… with no https:// in front works; so does a link with tracking parameters on the end.
Some material cannot be fetched at all: videos the uploader has made private, members-only videos, age-restricted videos, and anything blocked in your country. DropWave says which of those it hit rather than reporting a generic failure.
One of those messages is worth knowing on sight. "The site is rate-limiting this Mac" is not a problem with the video or with DropWave — the site has decided your connection has asked too often, and waiting a few minutes is the whole fix.
What you download is your responsibility. DropWave is a tool for getting a reference track into a session; it does not check, and cannot check, whether you are entitled to a given file.
Privacy
Your audio stays private whether it arrived from a link or off your own disk — analysis is local and nothing is ever uploaded.
The download is the one place DropWave uses the network, and it happens only when you paste a link. The connection goes to the site the link points at and carries the link and nothing else — no identifier, no file, nothing about you or your machine. More →