Help / Safety

What Nearfield will never do

Your Set is the one file with no second copy. These rules hold on every screen. They do not depend on a setting.

Your Sets are never changed

Nearfield only reads your .als files. When it fixes a Set, it saves a new copy beside your Set. The new copy has “[repaired]” in its name. Your own Set stays as it was. Open the copy in Live, and keep the one you like.

Nothing is written over

Whatever Nearfield saves for you gets a new name. There is no setting that lets it write over a file. A restored version, a copy for a collaborator and a fixed Set are each a new file.

A delete never crosses to another computer

If a file is deleted on one computer, Nearfield does not delete it on any other computer. This holds for a project you share and for your own other computers. If a collaborator deletes a sample from a shared project, your copy stays where it is.

Nearfield removes a file only when you say so

Nearfield does not remove your files, or the copies it made for you, until you press a button that says what it will remove. Most of these buttons then ask you to confirm. It removes only copies. For example:

• A duplicate whose same file stays in your library, and that no Set in the project still uses.
• A copy that Nearfield made itself, unchanged since it made it.
• Old saves that Nearfield kept itself, when you press “Clear old saves”.

It never removes a Set you made. It never removes a file in your User Library that you put there. It never removes anything in a project that you share at that moment, or in a folder kept by a cloud service. If the app is not sure, it does nothing.

Moving a sample pack aside is a move, not a delete. Nearfield can put it back where it was.

What a share sends

When you share a project, only these travel to the other computer:

• The Set.
• The samples that Set uses, read from the Set itself.
• Your master and your bounces, if the project has them.
• The project's cover picture, if you gave it one.

Nothing else in the project folder goes. Nothing about the other sounds in your library goes. A sample that the other computer already holds, with the same name and the same bytes, is not sent again.

Updates wait for you

The app tells you when a newer beta is out. It never downloads or installs an update by itself.

Backups cannot be read by anyone else

Backups are not part of the beta. They come in a later update. A backup is encrypted before it leaves your computer. The computer that holds it cannot open it, and neither can Nearfield. Only your own computers and your 12-word recovery code can open a backup. If you lose the code and every one of your computers, nobody can recover those backups.