Collabs

A collab is a shared collection of songs with named people in it, for working on a record together rather than sending something out once.

Collabs are part of Pro, including joining one. If you are invited and you are on the free plan, the invite waits for you — nothing expires while you decide.

What it gives you

• Everyone sees the same songs and the same bounces, with one thread of comments per bounce rather than a conversation scattered across messages.
• Everyone can hear them. A bounce that lives only on your Mac cannot stream to anybody, so DAWTER hosts one bounce per song for the collab — uploaded from whichever machine actually has the file.
• Nothing lands in anyone's Dropbox. A collab has no home in a cloud account, and creating one changes nothing in yours.

Inviting people

You invite by email address, and they do not need an account yet — the invite binds to them when they make one with that address. Two roles are offered:

• View — listen, and comment.
• Edit — listen, comment, add songs, and tag.

Anyone in a collab can comment, whatever their role. Only the owner can add or remove people, rename the collab, or delete it.

Hosted bounces

DAWTER hosts one bounce per song in a collab, and only for a song that needs it: a bounce already in somebody's Dropbox keeps streaming from there and costs nobody storage. The space counts against the owner of the collab, which is also who decides whose bounce is the hosted one if two people have the same song.

Hosted bounces cap at 60 MB each, which is generous for an mp3 and tight for a WAV. Export an mp3 for the collab and keep the WAV on your drive.

If a subscription lapses

Nothing is deleted. A collab whose owner is no longer on Pro goes quiet — it stops accepting new hosted bounces, and it is not listed — and it comes back exactly as it was when they subscribe again.