Hear it once, then work on it live
- Press Capture and play the song through in your DAW, start to end. Or drop an audio file on the window.
- Stop the DAW. The capture finishes by itself. The key, tempo and tuning are read the way the DropWave app reads them, and the song is split into vocals, drums, bass and other, on your Mac.
- It plays the stem mix. From then on the track plays as your mix of its four stems, in time with the DAW, through everything after it on the channel.
Nothing is exported and there is nothing to drag back in. Every change is heard live, and every control can be automated.
Four views
Stems
The song's arrangement: its key and tempo across the timeline, its sections, and the four stems as lanes. Mute or solo a stem, or click it inside one section to mute it only there.
Mix
A small console with level, pan, mute, solo and a meter for each stem. Pick a stem and its channel opens in full: a high-pass, a low shelf, a bell and a high shelf, and a compressor with its gain reduction.
Pitch
The Camelot wheel, made to choose with: click a key to move the song there, live, and see what mixes with where it lands. Fix tuning brings the song to A = 440 Hz, or to 442, 444 or 432. Keep formants keeps a voice sounding like itself when it moves.
Master
EQ, glue compression, stereo width and a true-peak limiter, on everything the plugin plays. Set the drive for −16, −14, −11 or −9 LUFS in one click, and watch integrated, short-term and momentary loudness, true peak and loudness range as it plays, to ITU‑R BS.1770‑4 and EBU R 128, beside what each streaming service will do to the level.
Compare, in time
Compare switches all of it off, stems, pitch and master, and plays the track as it comes in, in time and crossfaded. Click it again to come back. A status line along the bottom always says what the plugin is doing.
Split on your Mac
The split runs on your Mac, about 15 seconds per minute of song, and nothing is uploaded. Meanwhile the track keeps playing as it comes in.
Specs
| Formats | AU, VST3 and CLAP |
|---|---|
| Runs on | A Mac with Apple silicon. Splitting into stems needs macOS 15 or later |
| Install | DropWave → Install DropWave Editor…, in the DropWave app |
| Capture | Up to 12 minutes of a song, at the project's sample rate |
| Reads | Key with its Camelot code, tempo, tuning |
| Stems | Vocals, drums, bass and other |
| Latency | Reported to your DAW, which compensates for it |
| Window | Resizable, from 880 × 560; ⌘1–⌘4 switch views |
| Status | Dev Beta, since DropWave 3.4.4 |
On Windows, DropWave Editor is in the Dev Beta of DropWave for Windows, with a layout of its own. These pages describe the Mac version.