Sharing

A share link sends one mix to anyone. They press play in a browser: no account, nothing to install, and no app at their end.

Making one

Press Share on a bounce. DAWTER copies a link to your clipboard, and that is the whole flow.

What happens underneath depends on where the file is. A bounce in your own Dropbox streams straight from your account and is never copied anywhere. A bounce that only exists on your Mac has to be uploaded, because nothing else can serve it — so the drive holding it has to be connected at the moment you share, and the file has to be under 60 MB.

What the recipient gets

• A page with the song title, a waveform, and play.
• A download. Always. Anything playable in a browser can be saved anyway, so a switch to prevent it would protect nothing and only confuse what a link allows.
• A way to write back. They can leave notes against the song, timestamped where they left them, and those arrive next to your own notes on that bounce.

Links are meant to be passed on. If something should not travel, a collab with named people is the tool for it, not a share link.

Where the audio actually comes from

Three sources, and DAWTER picks rather than asking you to. This used to be explained in the app's Settings window, which is the wrong place for it — Settings should say what a control does, and there is no control here.

Your own Dropbox

A bounce in your Dropbox streams from your account, so nothing is copied anywhere and it does not count against your hosting. DAWTER has read-only access: it can resolve a link, and it has no permission to make anything public or to change a file.

One wrinkle worth knowing. A link you make yourself in Dropbox — right-click the file, Copy Dropbox link — is the one shape that opens the Dropbox app when it is tapped on a phone, rather than a web page. If you paste one of those onto a bounce by hand, DAWTER leaves it exactly as it is.

Google Drive

There is nothing to switch on. If a Drive folder is set to Anyone with the link can view, the files in it can be served with no Google login and nothing hosted — and sharing inherits, so one change on your Bounces folder covers everything in it, including whatever you bounce next month. DAWTER reads each file's Drive id off your own disk and builds the link itself.

It works this out per file rather than offering a setting: it asks Google whether the file will serve without a login, and hosts the ones that will not. Un-sharing the folder simply puts them back to being hosted. Two limits: Drive locks a file that gets heavy traffic for about a day, and a Drive link cannot be played by a browser from another site at all — so share links always use DAWTER hosting, and Drive-as-source suits personal and small-circle listening.

DAWTER's own hosting

When neither of the above applies — a bounce that only exists on this Mac — DAWTER uploads a copy and serves it. That is the part with a bill, and the part your plan meters. Settings → Cloud shows what you are using.

How long a link lasts

On the free plan, seven days, and you can have three links out at once. Sharing the same bounce again restarts its week. A fourth link is refused rather than quietly replacing an older one — a mix sent to a label on Monday must not die because a demo went to a friend on Wednesday.

On Pro, links do not expire, and there is no limit on how many you have out.

Sharing a whole collection

A collection shares as one link holding the songs in the order you arranged them, with its own artwork — up to 40 on the free plan and 100 on Pro. Past that the app says so in the share window before you make the link, so a short link never goes out looking like the whole collection. Everything above applies to each song inside it, and revoking the collection silences all of them at once. Collection links themselves are free.

Revoking

Stop sharing from the app, or from your account page, which lists every link you have out. Revoking takes the page down: anyone who opens it is told the link is no longer available.

One honest caveat. DAWTER never puts itself between the listener and the audio — that is what keeps playback fast and seeking accurate — so audio already in a browser's cache can keep playing for up to a day after you revoke. The page is gone immediately; a copy someone already has is a copy they already have.