Sessions & studios

What it is

A session is a time-boxed event where your team comes together to work on music. In a physical studio, online, or both. Think of it like a rehearsal or recording day: you set a date, invite people, attach the tracks you plan to work on, and everything that happens in that session stays collected in one place.

Studios are the bookable spaces where sessions happen. A studio has rates, equipment lists, photos, contact info, and a gear list, the permanent gear in the room (soundcard, desk, monitors, mics) so participants know what to expect before they arrive. Studios can also publish weekly opening hours: in the studio edit dialog, toggle each day on or off, add one or more time ranges per day, and copy one day's hours to the rest of the week in a click. The hours show up as a compact "Mon – Fri · 9 AM – 5 PM" summary on the studio card and on the public studios marketplace, so people know when a room is open before reaching out. Multiple studios can live in the same building, for example, a recording complex with rooms A, B, and C.

Using it

See who's booked where. The org Sessions page has three views behind the Display dropdown: List (filterable table), Calendar (month grid), and Timeline: a booking gantt with one row per studio, grouped by building. Bookings sit as bars on a day grid positioned by their real start and end, so a 3-hour session and a 4-day camp look different at a glance. Days the studio is closed (from its weekly opening hours, or a studio switched offline) are hatched, so the white space is genuinely bookable time. Two bookings that overlap in the same studio stack on separate lanes and both get a warning icon. A red line marks now; zoom between week, two weeks and month.

Schedule a session. From your team's Sessions page, click New session, give it a title, set the start time and (optionally) a duration, the end time is computed from start + duration and shown inline. For anything that runs longer than a day, a writing camp, a conference like ADE, pick Custom end (multi-day) in the duration list and set the end date and time directly; the end picker opens on the start's month. Multi-day sessions are one session, and they occupy their room and show on the calendar for every day they run, not only the day they start. Add a goal or inspiration note, and paste inspiration links right in the create form, they land on the session's inspiration moodboard the moment the session exists. A playlist link field takes a shared reference playlist (Spotify, Apple Music…) shown on the session page. Pick a past session under Re-invite participants from to see who was on it and have them pre-selected as participants. Sessions in the future start as scheduled; sessions with a start time in the past start as active immediately. The same form (all sections included) is used for team, organisation, and camp session creation.

Add tracks. Attach the tracks your team will work on. Each track link appears in the session's song list with optional notes. You can also link the session to an album. From the session's Tracks tab you can either link an existing track/album from your catalog, or use Create track / Create album to make a new one on the spot. Both open the create form with the team and session pre-filled.

Scan your sessions at a glance. The Sessions list shows a compact card per session: status, date/time, location, and a footer with the linked track covers, the linked album, and the avatars of everyone taking part, so you can recognise a session without opening it. The Studios view lists the studios you've worked in; each one has a New session button that opens the create form with that studio pre-selected.

Find sessions from the sidebar. The sidebar has a Sessions tab that works with or without an active team: live sessions first, then upcoming, then past, with a link to the full sessions page. Drag it in the "…" tab menu to pin or hide it.

Invite people. Add participants three ways, using the same picker as the track collaborators page: pick a person (a team member or a past collaborator, each shows the teams they belong to), pick an artist team and choose who from it comes (its artists fill in for you, add or drop rows before submitting; leave the rows empty to add the whole team), or invite a new person by email/name. Invitees get an email with a link to join. You can set one or more roles per participant (engineer, producer, collaborator, etc.) and split their revenue six ways, publishing, royalty, mechanical, sync, composition, and master, right from the invite dialog or inline in the participants table. Accepted participants see the session in their personal Sessions feed.

Start recording in one tap. In a hurry to capture an idea? Hit Start recording from the search command (⌘K) or the sidebar's Add menu. Aden spins up a fresh solo session, just you on it, defaulted to your team's base studio if you have one linked, drops you on its Recordings tab, and starts capturing straight away. No form to fill in; rename the session or invite people afterwards.

Record during the session. Use the in-browser recorder to capture audio directly, mic takes record mono Opus at a low bitrate (~0.5 MB/min) so reference takes stay small without becoming unintelligible. Add named markers while recording ("chorus hook" at 1:42) to tag moments you want to come back to, those markers are saved with the take and show up on it straight away, no reload needed. Each finished recording is saved to R2 storage and attached to the session.

Record what your computer is playing. The chevron next to Record session opens a What to record picker with three sources:

• Microphone: the room, your voice, an instrument. The default.
• Tab or screen audio: whatever is coming out of your machine: a reference playing in another browser tab, a mix in a web player, a video call. Your browser asks which tab or screen to share; tick "Also share tab audio" in that dialog, otherwise there is nothing to record and Aden will tell you so rather than saving a silent file.
• Microphone + tab or screen audio: both, mixed into one take, so you can talk over a reference and get a single file back.

Anything carrying tab or system audio records at a higher bitrate with the voice cleanup (echo cancellation, noise suppression) switched off, so a reference mix survives instead of being ducked and phased. The live source is labelled next to the timer and in the floating bar, "Tab audio", "Computer audio", "Microphone + tab audio", so you can always see what is being captured. If you end the share from your browser's own "Stop sharing" bar, the take is stopped and saved rather than lost.

Which sources you get depends on where you are:

Sources your browser can't deliver stay visible but disabled, with the reason on hover, never silently missing.

Record a browser tab from the extension. The Aden Chrome extension's popup has a Record tab audio block: pick a team, a session, and any open tab, and it captures that tab straight into the session. You keep hearing the tab while it records, the take keeps running after you close the popup (reopen it to see the live timer or stop), and closing the recorded tab stops and saves rather than losing the take. This is the cleanest way to record another tab, no share dialog and no checkbox to remember.

Control the recording from anywhere. A live recording shows a floating bar at the bottom of the app while you move around. From the bar you can see the session name and elapsed time, pause/resume, drop a marker (flag), and stop and save the take. You don't have to be back on the session page. The bar follows you, so a take you start on one session can be finished from anywhere.

Never lose a take. While you record, the audio is streamed to your device's local storage (IndexedDB) chunk-by-chunk, and a final flush fires when the tab is backgrounded or the machine sleeps, so a dropped connection, an accidental sleep/lock, a tab crash, or a closed window leaves a recoverable take instead of nothing. When you return, a recovery banner appears anywhere in the app (not just on the session it came from) offering to upload the stranded take to its original session; the local copy is deleted only once the upload succeeds. A take that is still being captured, even while paused, is never mistaken for an orphan, so the recovery banner won't pop up mid-session.

Pin inspiration for the room. Each session has an Inspiration tab. The same moodboard used on tracks and albums. Paste a reference link (TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, an image URL…) or upload an image, then browse it in grid, masonry, or canvas view. Session inspiration is stored in team_media with a session_id, so it stays scoped to that session. (The older free-text "inspiration" note still lives on the Overview tab.)

Upload a recording made elsewhere. Captured a take in another app? Use Upload recording on the session to attach an existing audio file (m4a, mp3, wav, webm, or mp4): it goes through the same storage and analysis pipeline as an in-browser take.

Share a session. Generate a share token to send a read-only view of the session to someone outside your team. They see the /session/[shareToken] public page.

Reflect afterwards. Once a session has started, a Reflect button appears in the session header (only while you haven't reflected yet) and opens the reflection dialog: a 0–5 star rating (half stars allowed) plus what went well, what could be better, and any other feedback. About the studio, technical problems, or people. Reflections are visible to everyone on the session, so whoever organised it (your team or your publisher) learns what to fix next time. All fields are optional; skip it entirely if the session was fine. Saved reflections appear in a compact read-only list on the session page, where you can edit or remove your own. Sessions can also be duplicated from the … actions menu (on the session header and on each card in the sessions list), and list cards show status as a colored icon with a tooltip.

Administration fee (publishers). When an organisation sets up a session, sourcing the studio and the people, it can attach an administration fee to the session with a short note on what it covers. The fee shows on the session detail page; invoicing runs through the organisation's normal invoice flow.

Studios (as a studio owner). If you run a recording studio you can list it on Aden by creating a studio organisation. Add your studio's details (rates, equipment, location), list the room's gear, group rooms under a building, and mark them as public and available. Artists can then link their sessions to your studio when booking.

Edit a studio. Open a studio's menu on the Studios page and choose Edit studio to change everything about the room. Name, category, address, availability and pricing, amenities, contact details, and the gear list. Pricing covers the fixed hourly and daily rates plus custom pricing rules (a label + amount + unit such as per session, per week, or a flat fee) so you can price a room however you bill it; these show as badges on the studio card. Add gear with Add gear: a name (e.g. "U87"), a category (microphone, audio interface, monitors…), and optional brand/notes.