Audio
- WAV
- AIFF
- MP3
- M4A / AAC / ALAC
- FLAC
- CAF
Video
The audio inside a video file is a legitimate source — a good share of sampled material comes from one — and DropWave reads it without any extra step. MP4, M4V, MOV, and anything macOS treats as a movie.
The extension is not a gate
This matters more than it sounds. DropWave works out whether it can open a file by opening it, not by looking at the last three letters of the name.
The practical consequence: a bounce with no file extension still works. So does a file someone renamed, a file that came out of a sampler, a file pulled off a phone. If macOS can decode it, DropWave analyses it. If it cannot, you get a clear failure rather than a confident wrong answer.
Limits
- Very short files — under about half a second there is nothing to measure.
- One file at a time. Drop several and DropWave analyses the first and tells you so, rather than silently ignoring the rest.
- DRM-protected files cannot be decoded by anything, DropWave included.
What it does not read
Project files, session files, DAW documents, MIDI files, or anything that would need a network connection. DropWave never goes online.