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Privacy in the app

What happens to the audio you drop on DropWave. The short version: it never leaves your computer.

Updated

Your audio is never uploaded

Every number DropWave reports (key, Camelot, tempo, tuning, loudness, true peak) is worked out from the file on your disk, by your computer. The audio, its name, its folder and its readings are never sent anywhere.

There is no DropWave account, no sign-in, no analytics and no tracking. The full privacy policy covers everything else.

What DropWave does online

Two things: it checks for updates, and it keeps its licence current. Nothing about your files is ever in either request.

  • Updates. When it starts and about twice a day, it asks our update server whether there is a newer version. The request carries the app's version and update channel, its licence, and your Dev Beta code if you have one, so the server knows which builds you can get. New versions download in the background and install only when you click Restart.
  • The licence. During the beta there's no key: when DropWave, DropWave Editor or DropWave Tune starts, and about once a day, it fetches a short licence for your computer from the same server. After the beta, the same check renews the licence you bought, and the key goes online once, when you enter it in DropWave Manager. The check carries a computer ID (a one-way scrambled form of your Mac's hardware ID that can't be turned back into it), so a licence works on your computers and a shared one stands out. Any DropWave product used online keeps it current for all of them; offline, they keep working for 14 days (30 with a bought licence).

Like any web server, ours sees the IP address a request comes from. It keeps it only for requests that look like an attack (wrong keys, scanning, far too many requests), for 30 days, to block abuse.

What happens to a file

  1. It is read from disk.
  2. The readings are worked out from it, on your computer.
  3. They are shown to you.

That's the whole lifecycle. DropWave never rewrites your audio: no tags, no sidecar files, no metadata.

The one thing that can change is a file name, and only when you ask. Tag Filenames writes the key and tempo into the names of the files you choose; DropWave shows you every rename first, never overwrites anything, and ⌘Z undoes it.

In the plugins

DropWave Editor and DropWave Tune do their work on your Mac too, and neither sends anything anywhere.

  • DropWave Tune works on the sound as it passes through, and records none of it.
  • DropWave Editor splits a song into stems on your Mac; nothing is uploaded. It keeps what it captured and the stems in a folder on your Mac, ~/Library/Application Support/DropWave Editor, so your project reopens with them.

Why it's built this way

Producers work on material that isn't theirs to upload: client stems, unreleased records, things under NDA. The usual way of finding out what key a file is in involves sending it to someone else's server. With DropWave that decision never comes up.

FAQ · About DropWave