Size matters.
So we make yours smaller.
Typically 72% smaller. Bit-perfect. Lossless.Crate encodes every stem losslessly, stores duplicate content once, and proves each file against SHA-256 when it packs and again when it restores. What comes back is your session, sample for sample.Unpacking is free. Forever. For anyone. Your first pack is on us.
CRATE
TRANSFER CONSOLE
A real pack, and a real figure — a top-decile outcome, shown here as an illustration. What a typical session looks like unfolds below.
session.crate
AES-256 · PAR2 · split — optional
Send
this one file to your friend —
them opening it is what unpacks everything to the right
Built by Jon RezinGrammy-winning mix & mastering engineer
Grammy-winning
Bad Bunny · Super Bowl LX
3.9B streams
Everyone moves audio with tools that were never made for it. Zip. Rar. We built Crate from scratch to do one thing better than anything else on earth: make audio smaller. It works. Nothing packs audio tighter. Smaller files move faster, cost less to send, and fail less often. And every pack is verified bit for bit (down to the sample level), so when it arrives you don’t cross your fingers. You know it’s perfect.
A tool, not a service.
Crate isn’t a cloud, and packing is never a rental — one payment unlocks it for good. It’s a desktop app that crushes your session into one small, verified file — then you send it however you already do: WeTransfer, Drive, a USB stick, email. They open it free, and their DAW relinks every file, perfectly.
Built for the people the internet forgot.
Two kinds of people kept hitting the same wall. Crate is for both.
Producers where data costs real money
In much of the world, sending a session can cost a day’s food. Crushing it typically 72% smaller means the work moves without the cost being a wall. We can’t fix everything — but we can close some of that gap.
Anyone working off bad Wi-Fi
Tour bus, hotel, a studio off a dirt road. The download won’t finish before you leave; the upload won’t beat the deadline. Smaller files actually make it — resumable parts, built-in recovery, no account.
Real problems Crate solves
The moments when standard tools cost you hours, money, or both.
Upload bar says 4 hours?
A 4 GB session on hotel Wi-Fi at 5 Mbps takes over an hour. Crate typically packs it to about 1 GB — same session, a quarter of the wait, every file verified, done before checkout.
A ZIP comes out twice the size.
Measured across twenty real client sessions — one machine, every result restored byte for byte: Crate’s default preset saved a median of 74.2% where a ZIP managed 51.5%, and packages build up to 8.8 times faster than RAR. Across 301 production packs, a session of a gigabyte or more typically lands about 72% smaller. Zero quality loss, every sample restored perfectly.
No clicks introduced to the mix.
Cloud transfers corrupt files silently. You find out when the mixer hears a pop at 2 AM. Crate decodes every compressed file back and SHA-256 checks it while packing — then again on restore. A bad sample is caught before you send, not after.
Three steps. No account.
Crate is a tool, not a service. It rides on whatever you already use to send files.
Drop your session in
Drag your consolidated folder onto Crate. It losslessly encodes every audio file — absolutely zero quality loss — and builds a tamper-evident manifest.
Send it your way
Transfer the .crate file with WeTransfer, Google Drive, a USB stick — anything. It's typically 72% smaller — up to 93% depending on the material. Optionally encrypt, split, or add recovery data.
They open it free
All crate files are free to receive and unpack with our app. The receiver restores a byte-for-byte copy. Every file verified. Your DAW relinks perfectly... automatically.
And it opens everything else. Drop a .zip, .rar,
.7z, .tar.gz, .iso or .dmg on Crate and it
extracts it right there — two dozen archive formats, right down to self-extracting
.exe files and disk images. A .tar.gz comes out as your files, not
as a .tar you have to open again.
I built this because I
was the one waiting.
I’m a mix and mastering engineer. For twenty years I’ve been the last set of ears between an artist’s vision and the audience — on records that ran from Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime to Karol G, and a Grammy stage or two.
But I mix from wherever the work is. I’ve shipped sessions from hotel rooms in Lagos, cafés in Vienna, and the Chicago loop on coffee-shop Wi-Fi held together by hope — watching downloads stall before checkout and uploads miss deadlines as I nearly miss my flight. And I saw what a single gigabyte of data actually costs people in the places my collaborators live.
So I built the tool I always wanted to exist: one that crushes a session small enough to send from anywhere, and proves every sample arrived perfect. That’s Crate.
CRATE is a fantastic tool for anyone who deals with music files. Having smaller packed files not only speeds up the process of sending and receiving, but it also helps me when I’m on the go. Coffee shops or cellular hotspots are now legitimate places I can send full sessions from. This last one was like 12GB and it compressed it down to like 500MB.
CRATE is solving a huge pain point for me when it comes to sending files. Slow WiFi? Large sessions? Now way more bearable. I think people will love seeing how this will help with hard drive management. With how SSD prices have been lately, this has already freed up so much precious storage.
Storage is cheap, unless it's not
In much of the world an extra drive costs multiples of a day's pay — and 2026's SSD prices made "just buy another one" expensive everywhere. So finished projects get trashed to make room. That's the quiet tax on creative work, and it's the one we refuse to accept.
Keep every project at a fraction of the size
Crate reduces what a session takes on disk by typically 72% — up to 93% measured — losslessly. The .crate on your drive restores to a byte-for-byte twin of the original, so archiving stops meaning goodbye.
Proof first, space second
Every file is SHA-256 verified when it's packed. Keep your originals until a restore has been verified — then reclaim the space with a receipt in hand, not a hope.
Nearly 500 GB back per packed terabyte
Point Crate at last year's sessions and let the queue run. With an afternoon you can recover nearly 500 GB per packed terabyte — and you never had to sacrifice a project to get it.
Full story: what a gigabyte really costs · archiving old sessions
Twenty real sessions · twelve engines · one machine
Zip sees bytes. Crate sees stems.
ZIP, RAR and the rest treat your WAVs as random bytes. Crate knows they’re audio — lossless FLAC, deduped loops and bus bounces, every Pro Tools pad byte kept — so it comes out smaller, and it proves every byte on the way back. Here is what that measured, on real sessions, against everything else.
An GB session leaves here at ≈3.9 GB — ≈79% smaller.
Quick picks:
Leaves as ≈3.9 GB ≈14.7 GB never goes up the pipe
Sending it raw costs ≈$55.80. Packed, ≈$11.77. That is ≈$44.03 you do not spend — every time this session moves.
On coffee-shop wi-fi it goes up in ≈1.7 hr instead of ≈8.3 hr, if the link holds its full rate.
Every figure in this panel is an estimate — a measured ratio applied to the size above, at an assumed $3.00 per gigabyte of mobile data. The price is a stand-in, not a measurement, and yours will differ.
Twelve engines, the same pooled sessions
The percentages are measured — ratios and per-gigabyte rates, taken on the corpus named above. Everything marked ≈ is those measurements projected onto your size. It is an estimate, not a measurement. Amber is an engine whose package is under 1.5× the size of ours. Red is 1.5× or more. Both round-trip your files correctly — the colour is size, nothing else. A hatched bar is the one thing that is not about size: that engine did not give every byte back. Each row reads: rank, engine, measured saving, then package, time to pack, time to open.
Crate is coloured because it is ours — not because its numbers were taken any differently. Same files, same machine, same clock, same stopwatch.
What each one actually promises you
| Capability | ZIP | RAR | 7-Zip | zstd | xz | gzip | Crate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audio-aware (lossless FLAC + dedup) | — | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Opens the archives clients send | — | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Verifies every file is bit-identical | CRC-32* | CRC-32* | CRC-32* | XXH64* | CRC-64* | CRC-32* | SHA-256, both ends ✓ |
| Built-in recovery data | — | optional | — | — | — | — | ✓ (PAR2) |
| Auto-relinks in your DAW | — | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| A GUI app on Mac, Windows & Linux | ✓ | — | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
* CRC-32 (ZIP, RAR, 7-Zip, gzip), CRC-64 (xz) and XXH64 (zstd — on by default in its CLI) catch accidental corruption but aren’t a cryptographic, per-file, end-to-end check — and the tar pipelines checksum the whole stream, not each file. Crate decodes and SHA-256-verifies every file while packing and on restore — the only tool here that proves your audio arrives sample-for-sample perfect.
zstd, xz and gzip are command-line stream compressors, so the benchmark ran each over a tar archive — zstd --ultra -22, xz -9e and gzip -9 — the way real sessions are shrunk with them.
Crate also opens the archives clients send: drop in a .zip or .rar and the files inside are packed losslessly and come back bit-for-bit identical. The guarantee covers the files, not the wrapper — on the Smallest setting the contents continue as a .crate package.
The receipts, not the promises.
Every figure on this site traces to one documented benchmark — thirteen archiver configurations on real client sessions, every result restored and compared byte for byte. Here is what the measurement says.
Typically 72% smaller.
Across 301 production packs, a session of a gigabyte or more lands about 72% smaller — that dataset’s overall median is 58.6%. The best single measured session saved 93.1%. Zero quality loss — every sample restored perfectly.
Half the size of a ZIP.
On twenty real client sessions pooled into four lanes, Crate’s default preset saved a median of 74.2% where ZIP managed 51.5% (15–88% across sessions) and RAR-best 68.2% — and built the package up to 8.8 times faster than RAR.
Verified bit for bit.
Crate decodes every compressed file back and SHA-256 checks it while packing, then re-hashes on restore — so the numbers above are numbers your own pack reproduces.
It lives where you work
No app to open first. Crate sits in the menu bar and the right-click menu, so packing is one gesture from anywhere in Finder.
Pack straight from Finder
Right-click a session folder and choose Pack with Crate — it packs on the spot with your defaults, no window to wrangle. Right-click a .crate to Unpack it back in place. Pick several at once and they all go.
A drop target that's always there
Crate waits in your menu bar. Drop folders on the Quick Bay and they pack immediately. A reorderable queue runs them one at a time — reprioritize what's up next, watch live progress, or cancel the whole run with a single click.
Whole albums in one pass
Select a dozen folders and pack them as one bundle or a separate .crate each — Crate asks, then queues them all. Drop a mix of folders and .crate files together and it sorts packing from unpacking for you. Nothing gets dropped.
Pay once. Pack forever.
One-time purchase, never a rental. The optional Send subscription is the only recurring charge. Works offline.
Download Crate and unpack any .crate file — always free. No purchase, no account, no limits. And your first pack is free — try real packing with no license.
Download CratePack unlimited sessions. Completely lossless — zero quality loss, verified bit-perfect on every pack. Optional encryption, multi-volume splitting and PAR2 recovery records. All updates included. Paid upgrades are rare, if ever.
Buy a licenseOne license for your whole room — up to 12 machines, managed from one place. The same lossless, verified packing. Less than buying individual licenses.
Buy StudioMore than 12 machines, multi-room, or education / site-wide? Let’s talk →
No install on their side — your clients send files straight from their browser through your own upload links. Receiving is always free, for everyone.
Download Crate — free
One app. Unpacking is always free, and your first pack is on us. Buy a license for unlimited packing.
Choose your operating system
.crate file? Download Crate — unpacking is always free.🎁 Buy as a gift — same license, delivered to whoever you choose at checkout.
Frequently Asked Questions
No questions match that. Try another word, or ask us directly.
Do I need an account?
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.
What does the person I send to need?
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.
Is it really lossless?
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.
Can I prove it's bit-perfect myself?
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.
Will my DAW session still open?
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.
How much space does it save?
Measured, not promised. On our 20-session benchmark — twenty real client sessions pooled into four lanes, every result restored and compared byte for byte — stem sets save 78.9%, mixed sessions save 74.1%, loop-heavy material saves 68%, live and unbroken takes save 64.7%. Across 301 production packs the overall median is 58.6%, and a session of a gigabyte or more lands about 72% smaller. A ZIP of those same sessions saved a median of 51.5% (per-session range 15–88%) — close to twice the .crate package’s size. Every bit of quality is preserved — completely lossless, sample-for-sample identical.
What audio formats are supported?
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.
Which DAWs work with Crate?
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.
Is there a subscription?
Not for packing. Pay once, pack forever — a one-time license unlocks unlimited packing, and it never re-locks. The only subscription is Crate Send, the optional hosted transfer: while it's active it covers unlimited sends and packing, and 12 paid months earn the license outright — you stop paying and keep the app. Receiving is always free for everyone.
Why does Crate exist?
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 typically takes that session down to about 1 GB 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.
How is Crate different from ZIP or RAR?
ZIP and RAR read your audio as random bytes. Crate uses purpose-built lossless codecs that understand PCM audio, and dedupes the loops and bounces a session repeats. Measured on twenty real client sessions pooled into four lanes, one machine, every result round-trip verified: ZIP saved a median of 51.5% (15–88% across sessions), RAR-best 68.2% (28–92%), Crate’s default preset 74.2% (38–93%) — so a ZIP comes out close to twice the .crate package’s size, and Crate builds it up to 8.8 times faster than RAR. Then Crate SHA-256 verifies every file to prove the restore is identical. Neither ZIP nor RAR does that.
Why use Crate instead of just WeTransfer or Dropbox?
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 by typically 72% — up to 93% measured — 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.
How do I know the restore is really identical — not just "probably fine"?
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.
Can I pack right from Finder?
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.
Can I pack a whole batch of folders at once?
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.
Can I use my own cloud service to send files?
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.
What if a file gets corrupted during transfer?
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.
What does it cost?
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, forever. The only recurring payment is the optional Crate Send subscription — and 12 paid months of Send earn the license outright.
Is the first pack really free?
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.
I lost my license key.
No problem. Click here to recover it — enter the email you used to purchase and we'll re-send your key.
Why does my unpacked folder show a different size in Finder?
Short answer: what you unpacked is your session, bit for bit — the size difference is how your drive reports storage, not the files. Two things are happening. First, Crate skips system junk files (.DS_Store and friends) — the same ones ZIP and RAR skip — because macOS regenerates them automatically; your copy gets a fresh one the moment you open the folder in Finder. Second, if your drive is APFS, the "on disk" figure shifts a little: the drive may store your original files in a compressed form while freshly written files are stored plain. The content is identical; the storage bookkeeping isn't. Two levers if you want the numbers to sit closer: use Re-verify or Refresh Finder size in the app — sometimes that nudge is all Finder needs — and if your session contains zips, turning on Archive expansion in Settings repacks their contents through the same lossless pipeline instead of storing the archive whole, so repeated audio inside them compresses properly. And the verification isn't Finder's opinion — every file was SHA-256 fingerprinted when packed and re-checked when restored. If it says verified, the files are identical. Not close, not similar — identical.
Can I trust a small team with my archives? What happens if Crate disappears?
Every format you already trust was built by a team this size or smaller — none had corporate scale until the ecosystem adopted them, not the reverse:
- ZIP — Phil Katz, essentially alone (PKWARE: two people and a lawyer)
- tar & gzip — no company at all: Bell Labs and two GNU volunteers
- 7-Zip — Igor Pavlov, one person in 1999; still a tiny team
- FLAC — Josh Coalson, one developer, then the Xiph.Org nonprofit
- WavPack — David Bryant, one person, to this day
- WinRAR — a small family company, ~10 people
Your .crate files are built on those same standard tools (7-Zip, FLAC, WavPack) — no Crate-proprietary byte anywhere in the container — and Crate's complete format specification, reference decoder and runnable proof are published at github.com/fluxcodestudio/crate-format — any engineer, or any AI assistant, can reconstruct every file byte-exactly with the standard tools alone. Unpacking is free forever, in Crate and without it, and your crates stay openable even if you never open our app again. Longevity for your masters is the product, not the promise.
Where can I read the full no-lock-in story?
On the Never locked in page — it walks through all three layers in depth: how a Standard pack opens with free 7-Zip and codec tools today, the release gate that proves every tier rebuilds without Crate, and the published pledge — the complete format specification, reference decoder and test vectors are public at github.com/fluxcodestudio/crate-format, with the standing commitments (unpacking free forever, backward compatibility as a release gate, and exactly what happens if we ever dissolve) written down and signed.
What are the system requirements?
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.
How do I get support?
Open a support request below — include your license key for priority support.