send HUGE sessions
even when the internet sucks.

No — ever. Crate works offline day-to-day; activating a license needs a brief internet connection once per device, then a generous offline grace keeps you working anywhere. Your first pack is free, and a one-time license key unlocks unlimited packing. No login, no cloud.

The same app — Crate. It's a free download, and unpacking is always free. No account, no payment, on Mac, Windows, or Linux. They drag the .crate file on and get a byte-for-byte copy.

Yes — completely lossless, zero quality loss. Not "nearly" lossless, not "perceptually" lossless. Every single sample is mathematically identical to the original. FLAC and WavPack are proven lossless codecs used by archives and studios worldwide. Then SHA-256 verifies every file. Bit-for-bit identical, guaranteed.

Yes — and you don't have to take our word for it. Pack a session, restore it to a new folder, then hash both folders with your own operating system's tools (shasum on Mac/Linux) and compare — every file's hash matches, byte for byte. Crate already checks every file twice with SHA-256 (once when packing, once when restoring), but the point is you can confirm it independently, with tools we don't control. We ran exactly this on a 1.2 GB Pro Tools mix session — 600+ real files, every one confirmed identical by the OS itself, while the session shrank ~60%. The docs show the exact commands.

Yes. Every file is restored to the exact same bytes — same size, same content, same metadata — as if Crate never touched it. Sessions relink and reopen exactly as they were. Pro Tools, Logic, Ableton, Studio One, Reaper, FL Studio, Cubase — everything relinks automatically.

It depends on the content. Silence-heavy stems (kick, snare, percussion) compress 95%+ — a snare track is 90% silence and Crate crushes it. Sparse stems (vocals, guitar) compress around 80%. Dense continuous audio (pads, buses) still compresses about 59%. A typical 40-80 stem mix session shrinks 59-89% overall. ZIP on the same files? About 3%. Every bit of quality is preserved — completely lossless, sample-for-sample identical.

Every format your DAW can export. WAV, AIFF, AIFF-C, CAF, Wave64 — all losslessly compressed and restored byte-for-byte. Float and integer PCM, mono to surround, any bit depth and sample rate. Already-compressed formats (MP3, AAC, FLAC, OGG) and non-audio files (session files, notes, images) are stored perfectly as-is. Even niche formats like RF64 and BW64 are preserved bit-for-bit. Nothing is ever modified or left behind.

All of them. Crate works at the file level, not inside your DAW — so it's completely DAW-agnostic. Pro Tools, Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Cubase, Nuendo, Studio One, Reaper, FL Studio, Bitwig, Pyramix, SADiE — if it saves files to disk, Crate handles it. Session files, plugin settings, and every piece of metadata come through intact. Open the session on the other end and everything relinks.

No. Pay once, pack forever. All updates included. Paid upgrades are rare, if ever. Receiving is always free for everyone.

Because a 4 GB session shouldn't cost someone a day's pay to download. In much of the world, mobile data is $3–10 per gigabyte — and that's often the only connection available. Crate shrinks that session down to about 520 MB with zero quality loss, so collaborators everywhere can receive your work without choosing between bandwidth and rent. It started as a tool for sending stems across oceans on bad connections. It turned into the way audio should have always moved.

ZIP barely touches audio — a 4 GB session shrinks to maybe 3.8 GB. RAR does better with its audio mode, getting that down to around 2.8 GB. Crate uses purpose-built lossless codecs that understand PCM audio and takes the same session to about 520 MB — with zero quality loss. On silence-heavy stems like kick and snare, Crate compresses 95%+ where RAR manages around 40%. Then Crate SHA-256 verifies every file to prove the restore is identical. Neither ZIP nor RAR does that.

Because they move bytes — they don't understand audio, and they don't prove anything arrived intact. WeTransfer and Dropbox send your session at full size (a 4 GB session is 4 GB on their bandwidth and their clock), with size caps, expiring links, or a monthly bill for the space. Neither one re-encodes audio, so a silently corrupted stem arrives looking perfectly fine. Crate is different on both fronts: it shrinks the session 59–89% with zero quality loss, and it SHA-256 verifies every file on the way in and the way out, so "bit-perfect" is something you can see, not hope for. Crate isn't a replacement for them — pack with Crate, then send the smaller, verified .crate over whichever service you already use.

Crate proves it at every step. While packing, it doesn't trust the codec — it decodes each compressed file back to raw audio and confirms the SHA-256 matches the original, so an encoder glitch is caught before you ever send. Each file's hash, bit depth, sample rate and channel layout are recorded in a manifest signed with Ed25519 by default — the receiving app checks the signature and shows the sender’s key fingerprint, so tampering in transit is detected and the sender can be confirmed. On restore, every file is re-hashed and compared, and Crate writes an integrity report — "34 of 34 files restored and verified bit-perfect." If anything fails, the restore is thrown away whole rather than leaving you a half-rebuilt session. ZIP's CRC-32, WeTransfer, and Dropbox do none of this.

Yes. Right-click any folder and choose Pack with Crate — it packs immediately with your default settings, no app window to open first. Right-click a .crate file and choose Unpack with Crate to restore it. Select several items at once and Crate handles them all, sorting folders to pack from .crate files to unpack. Crate installs these menu items itself the first time it runs.

Yes. Select multiple session folders — or a whole album — and Crate asks whether to combine them into one bundle or make a separate .crate for each. Either way they line up in a queue that runs one at a time, so your machine isn't crushed doing ten at once. The menu-bar Quick Bay shows what's running and what's next; reorder the queue, or cancel the entire run with one click.

Yes — any service, any method. Crate is a tool, not a platform. Pack your session, then send the .crate file however you want — Google Drive, Dropbox, WeTransfer, S3, a USB drive, even AirDrop. Crate doesn't upload, doesn't store, doesn't touch the internet. Your files, your choice of transport.

Crate catches it. Every file is SHA-256 verified on pack and again on restore — if even one bit is wrong, you'll know immediately instead of discovering a click in the mix at 2 AM. For unreliable connections, add PAR2 recovery data and Crate can repair corruption automatically without re-downloading. Split into resumable volumes so a dropped connection doesn't mean starting over.

Your first pack is free — try real packing with no license. Unpacking is always free for everyone, everywhere — no payment, no account. A one-time license then unlocks unlimited packing. No subscription, ever.

Yes. Every install gets one free, full-feature pack — completely lossless, fully verified, no watermark, no catch — so you can try real packing on your own session before you buy. Unpacking is always free for everyone. When you're ready for more, a one-time license unlocks unlimited packing.

No problem. Click here to recover it — enter the email you used to purchase and we'll re-send your key.

macOS — 10.15 Catalina or later (Apple Silicon & Intel). Windows — Windows 10 or later, 64-bit. Linux — Ubuntu 22.04+ or Debian 12+, or any distro with glibc 2.35+ and libwebkit2gtk-4.1, x86_64. Every build is 64-bit. No GPU required, and encoding speed scales with CPU cores. Packing is the memory-intensive step — Crate holds audio in RAM while it compresses and verifies it — so RAM headroom is what lets very large sessions, and very large single files, pack comfortably. Restoring is much lighter.

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