Share watermarks

What it is

A watermark marks the music on a share link so a leaked copy leads back to you. There are two kinds, and you can use either or both:

• Audible: a short tag you upload (a voice drop, a producer stinger, a beep) that plays over the music every so often. Anyone who hears it knows whose track it is.
• Inaudible: a hidden ID woven into the audio itself. You can't hear it, but drop a leaked file back into Aden and it tells you which share link that file came from, and who you sent it to.

Teams keep their own watermarks; organisations keep house watermarks that every team in the org can use.

Using it

Adding a watermark

1. Go to Settings → Watermarks on your team (or the Settings tab of your organisation).
2. Click New watermark and pick the type: Audible, Inaudible, or Both.
3. For anything audible, drop an audio file on the dropzone (or click it to browse), MP3, WAV, M4A or FLAC, up to 15 seconds, then choose how often it plays and how loud it sits over the music. An inaudible watermark needs no file at all; just name it.
4. Turn on Use on new share links if you want every new share to start with this watermark applied.

Press play on any audible tag in the list to hear it back. Removing a watermark deletes its audio and stops watermarking on the links that used it. The links themselves keep working.

Watermarking a share

In the track Share dialog, switch on Watermark the audio and pick a tag. If your team has a default tag, it is already selected when the dialog opens.

You can also flip watermarking on or off on an existing share from its card in the Share tab.

What the listener gets

• On the share page an audible tag plays over the music at your interval, with the song ducking underneath it. An inaudible watermark changes nothing they can hear.
• On download the file is marked before it saves. The tag mixed in, the hidden ID woven through, or both. Watermarked downloads come out as WAV.

Tracing a leaked file

Under your watermarks there is a Check a file box. Get hold of the file download it from wherever it turned up, and drop it in. Aden tells you which of your share links it came from, who that link was sent to, and when it was created. The file never leaves your browser; the check runs locally.

The verdict reads Certain match or Likely match, with the underlying match strength behind the info icon: an unmarked file scores about 5, and anything over 8 is a match, so a certain result is not a close call. No match means exactly that. The file carries no mark from any of your links, either because it predates the watermark or because it was re-encoded heavily enough to destroy it. It never guesses.

The check looks at the links of the team whose settings you are on, so if you manage several teams, check from the team the track belongs to.

The hidden ID survives the things that usually happen to a leaked file: a volume change, being converted to mono, having the start trimmed off, or being re-encoded to a different sample rate. Very heavy re-encoding or time-stretching can destroy it, in which case the check simply comes back with no match rather than a wrong one.

Organisation tags

Watermarks added on an organisation show up for every team in that organisation, marked From organisation. Teams can use them on shares but can't edit or delete them, that stays with the org's admins.