Last updated 17 October 2026
DAWTER is a library for music you haven't released. That only works if you trust it with unreleased work, so this page says plainly what is stored, where it lives, and how to get rid of it.
It covers both DAWTER apps — the Mac app, which scans your drives and your Dropbox for projects, and the iPhone app, which plays and shares what the Mac app found. They are one account and one library: what either one stores is described below, and where only one of them does something, it says so.
Short version: DAWTER stores the information about your projects — names, file paths, tempo, key, your notes and tags — so it can show you a library. It does not upload your project files or your audio, except the specific bounces you choose to share. There are no third-party analytics or trackers in the app or on this website.
An email address and a password. Authentication is handled by Supabase Auth; the password is hashed by Supabase and DAWTER never sees or stores it. Your email is also how a collaborator invites you to a shared collection.
For each project DAWTER finds, it stores what it needs to list and sort it:
File paths can contain your name. A path like
/Users/yourname/Music/… is stored as-is, because it is how DAWTER finds
the file again. If that matters to you, it is worth knowing before you scan.
Bounces normally stay on your own machine or in your own cloud storage, and are streamed from there when you press play. Audio leaves your control only when you choose it:
Hosted audio lives in Cloudflare R2. Delete the share or the collaboration and the audio is removed with it.
If you connect Dropbox, DAWTER stores a refresh token so it can keep reading the folders you picked without asking you to sign in again. Tokens are encrypted at rest, and the exchange runs in a server-side function that holds the Dropbox client secrets — the desktop app never holds them.
DAWTER's Dropbox access is read-only. It requests four permissions
and no others: account_info.read, files.metadata.read,
files.content.read and sharing.read. It lists the folders you
choose in order to find project files and bounces, and downloads or streams a bounce
when you play or export one. It cannot write, move, rename or delete anything
in your Dropbox, and it does not read folders you did not select.
Disconnecting Dropbox in DAWTER's settings deletes the stored token. You can also revoke DAWTER from your Dropbox account's connected-apps page at any time.
Both apps have a Report a problem form. Nothing is sent unless you fill it in and press send. What goes with it is your message, the reply address you type if you choose to, your account, which app and version you were running, the platform, and a short log of errors the app recorded while it was open. You can expand the report before sending it and read exactly what is attached.
Reports are used to fix the problem and to reply to you, and nothing else. They are not analytics: nothing is sent while you simply use the app.
On a Mac, DAWTER keeps a .dawter folder in your home directory holding
your signed-in session, a per-machine key used to sign that session cookie, and local
caches of where your files are. These never leave your machine. Your theme is remembered
in the app's local storage and, so it follows you between machines, with your account.
On an iPhone, the app keeps your signed-in session in the system keychain and your settings in its own storage. Both are removed when you log out or delete the app. The iPhone app reads no files on your phone and asks for no access to your photos, contacts or location. It plays audio; it never records any.
dawter.app serves no cookies and runs no analytics scripts. One thing is recorded: each click of a download button, so we know how many people are downloading. That row holds the time, which installer was handed out, a two-letter country code, the broad platform (mac, windows, …), whether the request looked like a bot, and the host of the referring site.
It does not record your IP address, your user agent, the full referring URL, or anything that identifies you or your device.
Your data is not sold, rented, or shared with advertisers. It is not used to train anything. It reaches exactly three places, all as infrastructure:
Other people see your work only where you asked them to: someone you send a share link to, or a collaborator on a collection you invited them to.
Removing a project from your library never touches the file on your disk. DAWTER does not delete your music.
DAWTER is not directed at children under 13 and accounts are not knowingly created for them.
If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who sees it, the date at the top changes and the change is noted in the app's release notes.
Questions, deletion requests, or anything that reads wrong here: dgamlam@gmail.com.