Demos and works in progress, off the streaming services
Rough mixes should not be uploaded anywhere. A local library gives you the car test, the headphone test and the walk test without your unreleased work leaving the phone.
Rough mixes belong on your phone, not on a server. A local player gives you the car test, the earbuds test and the walking-around test without an unreleased track being uploaded, shared by link, or sitting in a cloud folder with sync history. Bounce, transfer, listen, and nothing leaves the device.
The short version
- Nothing is uploaded. Refrain makes no network requests in normal use.
- Wi-Fi transfer moves a bounce from the DAW machine to the phone in seconds.
- Use the album field for the version —
Mix 4,2026-08-17— so you can hear the progression. - Delete old versions ruthlessly. Six similar mixes with unclear names is its own problem.
- No gapless playback, so a sequenced album will have gaps between tracks.
Why not a cloud folder
Most people use Dropbox or Google Drive for this and it mostly works. The reasons not to are worth stating.
It is an upload. Unreleased work, client work, or a track under NDA now exists on somebody else's infrastructure with a sync history. For most demos that is fine. For some it is genuinely not, and "fine" is a judgement you have to make each time rather than a property of the workflow.
Links leak. A shareable link is shareable by whoever has it. Rough mixes have a way of turning up.
It needs a connection to be reliable. A file in a cloud folder may be a placeholder when you press play in the car park.
It is not a listening environment. You end up auditioning a mix in a file browser, one tap at a time, with no queue and no way to A/B two versions.
The local alternative removes all four. The bounce goes from your DAW machine to your phone over your own network and stops there.
The loop
Fast enough to do several times an evening, which is the point.
Bounce. MP3 320 or AAC is right for this. You are testing arrangement, balance and low end on real-world playback systems, not evaluating converters, and a smaller file transfers faster.
Transfer. In Refrain, Add → Receive over Wi-Fi. Open the address it shows in a browser on your studio machine, enter the code, drag the bounce onto the page. It appears in the library seconds later. The guide.
Listen properly. Car, earbuds, kitchen speaker, and on a walk. The walk is the one that tells you most — a mix that survives twenty minutes of half-attention is doing something right.
Go back and fix it. Repeat.
Naming so you can tell versions apart
The failure mode here is six files called Track 3 mix and no idea which is which. Two
minutes of structure prevents it.
Title — the song name, unchanged across versions.
Album — the version or the date. Mix 4. 2026-08-17. Now the versions group and browse
in order, and A/B-ing two of them is switching between albums.
Artist — you, consistently, so all your works-in-progress sit together and away from everything else.
Set these in one pass: tap Edit, select the bounces, tap Edit in the toolbar, set album and artist for the whole selection. Detail.
Then delete. When mix 5 lands, delete mixes 1 and 2. Old rough mixes have no value and they make the current one harder to find.
Reference tracks
The other half of mix listening: commercial records you know intimately, played back to back with your own on the same system.
Keep a References playlist of five or six tracks in the same territory as what you are
working on. Refrain plays them at whatever level they were mastered at — there is no
normalisation, no gain matching, no loudness levelling — which for this purpose is exactly
right. Your rough mix will sound quieter than a mastered reference. That difference is
information.
Sharing a demo without uploading it
If someone needs to hear it and you would rather not put it in a cloud folder: AirDrop the file. Direct, no server, no link.
Refrain has no sharing feature of its own — no export, no send, no link generation. Files go in and do not come out through the app.
What this doesn't do
- No recording or editing. It is a player.
- No gapless playback, so a sequenced album or a continuous mix will have small gaps.
- No loudness normalisation or gain matching.
- No resume position on long files.
- No waveform view or precise scrubbing — it seeks like a music player, not an editor.
- No sharing or export.
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Last updated 7 August 2026