Your DAW knows the take number. It just won't show it to you — not big enough to read from the couch, not anywhere a producer can glance at mid-session. The one place it reliably appears is in the names of the files written while recording.
Take Counter reads it from there. No plugins, no MIDI, no project changes — a small always-on-top window with the current take, huge, and red exactly when tape is rolling.
This tool came out of frustration. I'm a classical music producer, and I record classical music in a number of settings, studios, and DAWs. The take number is the core concept of a classical recording session — and, dare I guess, probably of other genres too. Yet most DAWs make it hard to work with the score and keep track of the current take: you either glance at the tiny number at the end of the previously recorded clip (and hope the screen hasn't just rolled over), or at the track header, if you're using playlists. If you're an engineer cooperating with the music producer, it's even harder, and it often resorts to the conversation:
I finally decided to build the tool that eases my own life, hoping other engineers and producers will find it useful too. This is an initial public release: please read the docs, understand the heuristics and their limitations — and I'll welcome all feedback and suggestions at support [at] takecounter [dot] app.
— Antoni Grzymala
Take Counter is native Swift — SwiftUI and AppKit, no Electron, no bundled browser, no runtime. The download is a universal binary — a "fat binary," as veterans of the 68k-to-PowerPC days would know it — carrying a complete app for Apple silicon and a complete app for Intel at roughly 0.4 MB apiece, and still smaller than this page's fonts would be, if it had any. It behaves the way Mac apps should: one process, instant launch, and it stays out of your CPU meter while you record. Measured on Apple silicon with a live session and the remote display serving.
Free for a week, fully functional — no account, no card. After that it nudges politely for three weeks before asking for a license.
One license covers you — or your whole small studio — on every machine; larger facilities license per studio seat (the terms are three sentences, honor-based). The license is a small file — paste it in or drop it in your home folder. Works on air-gapped studio computers; there is no activation server to reach.
Prefer Homebrew? One line, same notarized app:
brew install --cask antoszka/tap/takecounter