How takes travel between two DAWs — verified, named, positioned

Remote recording lives or dies on one question: is the file that lands in your project actually the performance? Not a re-encoded shadow of it, not a copy with a dropout buried in verse two, and not a region you have to line up by eye. This guide walks the whole journey of a take — from the plugin on your collaborator’s track to the exact bar in your session — and gives the placement recipe for each DAW, marked honestly by how thoroughly we’ve tested it.

The live feed is not the take

With a SessionLinked plugin on each track your collaborator sends (today, from Logic Pro on a Mac — the sending side we’ve proven; more DAWs are coming), those tracks stream live into your companion app — each on its own channel with solo, mute and a fader, so you can balance the room however you like while you work. That live feed is for playing together. It rides the network in near real time, which means a rough connection can make it wobble — and that’s fine, because it is never the take.

The take is recorded locally on the player’s machine, at full resolution, while you both listen to the live feed. The two are completely separate paths: one optimised to be fast, the other to be perfect. You never trade one for the other.

Byte-verified, or it didn’t happen

When the take is delivered, the companion doesn’t take the network’s word for it. Every file is checked byte-for-byte against the original on the sender’s machine before it’s marked as arrived. If a single byte is wrong, it isn’t a take yet — it’s a retry. Takes in your session library are byte-verified on arrival and named by player, track and take number — and anything that cannot be verified is clearly marked as such, never silently trusted.

The position stamp

Every take also carries a BWF (Broadcast Wave) timestamp — a standard, embedded marker recording exactly where on the timeline it began. It’s part of the file itself, so it travels with the audio wherever the file goes. What your DAW does with that stamp varies, which is why the recipes below are per-DAW.

Placing a take, DAW by DAW

1. 1
   Logic Pro — verified in-houseDrag in, select regions, Edit ▸ Move ▸ To Recorded Position (⌥⇧⌘R) — places exactly, multi-region. We’ve tested this against control files ourselves.
2. 2
   Pro Tools — documented, not yet verified in-houseImport Audio → Location: Spot → Original Time Stamp. Trap: “Drag and Drop Conforms to Session Tempo” makes an Elastic-stretched copy — must be off.
3. 3
   Ableton Live — documented, not yet verified in-houseLive cannot read the position stamp — drop each take at the time position shown next to it in the app. Trap: Auto-Warp Long Samples is ON by default and time-stretches takes — turn it off.
4. 4
   Reaper, Cubase, Studio One — not yet verified in-houseTakes are standard WAVs and open in any DAW. We haven't run our placement survey on these three yet, so we won't state a one-step recipe until we have — each take shows its recorded position in the app, so you can always place it by hand.

“Verified in-house” means exactly that: we generated control files, dropped them into a real project, and watched where they landed. Where we haven’t done that yet, we say so — the setup guides carry the same honest markings per DAW.

Why this beats every other route

Screen-share audio is lossy by design. Recording your collaborator through an armed track captures the network’s best guess, jitter and all. And a WeTransfer round-trip gets you the real file eventually — unnamed, unpositioned, and a day late. Delivering the local recording, byte-verified, with its position stamped inside the file, is the only route where the take in your mix is provably the take they played. Everything else in SessionLinked — the live mixer, the naming, the session library — exists to make that route feel effortless.