Privacy Policy

This policy explains how The Undernet LLC (“we”, “us”) handles personal information in connection with the Underscore application and underscore.website and its subdomains, including the documentation and Undercurrent wave designer. The Undernet LLC is the data controller. We are based in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

The application

No advertising or built-in usage analytics. Underscore does not require an app account or password and does not contain advertising or usage-analytics software. We do not operate our own crash-reporting service. Local audio diagnostics and Apple's aggregate reports and optional crash reports are described below.

Your license. For a direct purchase, the app imports a signed license file and stores it on your Mac. The file includes your purchase email address and license identifiers. The app displays the registered email address and verifies the signature locally. Using a saved valid license does not require an online license check.

Your work stays local. Kits, samples, projects, exported WAV files and application settings are written to your own disk, in locations you choose or in the app's local data folders. The ordinary direct-download edition uses ~/Library/Underscore for its private data; sandboxed editions use a location within their app container, and test editions can use a separate folder. We do not upload your music or provide a cloud-sync service. If you use a separate cloud storage or backup service for your files, that service handles them under its own settings and policies.

Local audio diagnostics. The app automatically keeps a limited, rolling set of diagnostic logs on your Mac to help investigate audio problems. These record technical observations such as app and operating-system versions, sample rate, buffer size, processing load, playback state, signal levels and error counters. They do not contain audio, project contents, sample names, device names or file paths. In the ordinary direct-download edition they are stored in ~/Library/Underscore/Diagnostics; the folder follows the edition-specific data location described above. The diagnostic logger does not upload these logs. Help > Save Audio Diagnostics saves a report locally, which you can choose to send to support.

Recording computer audio. When you choose Record Audio, Underscore can record audio playing on your Mac, including its own output and audio from other apps, after macOS grants permission. Recording is indicated in the app and can be stopped there. Captured audio is saved locally as a WAV and is not uploaded to us. This feature does not capture microphone input or screen images. Cancel keeps the original pad sample unchanged, but can leave a nonempty recording in the app's local Recordings folder. Cancel does not mean that a saved WAV has been erased.

Performance-recorder metadata. WAV files made by the performance recorder contain the original project name in their Broadcast WAV description metadata. Renaming a recording does not remove that embedded name, and the recorder preserves it when trimming or exporting a copy. Someone you share that WAV with may be able to read the original name from its metadata. This describes recordings made by the performance recorder, not every WAV exported by the app.

Software updates. The direct-download edition uses Sparkle to check our Cloudflare-hosted Underscore 1 update feed on launch, periodically in the background, and when you choose Check for Updates. Updates are installed after your approval. These requests expose standard network information to our host, including your IP address, request time, app version and user-agent. The updater does not send your license file, license ID, purchase email, samples, projects or other music. Optional Sparkle system profiling is disabled.

Web links. Help and support links open in your default web browser. Website requests and downloads are subject to the sections below. If a future release adds other network features, its release notes and this policy will describe the relevant processing before they take effect.

Undercurrent

Undercurrent synthesises and plays audio in your browser. WAV exports and saved JSON recipes are generated locally, and a recipe you choose to load is read locally. The tool does not upload your audio, recipes or edits to us. The website requests used to load Undercurrent are subject to the hosting practices described below.

This website

Website features. We do not use advertising tags or session-recording services on our product and documentation pages. Our authored fonts, images, stylesheets and scripts are served from our domains. The purchase page temporarily keeps its download-access token in your browser's session storage so that refreshing the page can resume the same purchase. This storage is limited to that browser tab; it is not used for advertising or cross-site tracking. The documentation site also uses browser local storage to remember your light, dark or automatic theme preference. You can clear that preference through your browser's site-data controls. External checkout services have their own privacy and cookie policies.

Server logs. The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Like any web host, Cloudflare records standard request information – IP address, timestamp, requested URL, referring page, and browser user-agent – and uses it to serve the site, to protect it against attack and abuse, and to produce aggregate traffic counts. Cloudflare processes this on our behalf under its own data processing terms. We do not use it to build advertising profiles or track visitors across unrelated websites.

Traffic and performance measurements. Our hosting includes aggregate traffic reporting. Product and documentation pages may also use Cloudflare Web Analytics to measure page views and page-load performance. Its browser beacon sends information such as the page URL, referrer and performance measurements to Cloudflare. Cloudflare describes this service as using no analytics cookies or browser fingerprinting. We use these reports to understand site use and reliability, not for advertising or tracking people across unrelated websites. See Cloudflare's Web Analytics documentation.

Hosting security and diagnostics. Requests to our sites pass through Cloudflare. In addition to the request processing above:

• Cloudflare may set a strictly necessary security cookie to tell automated traffic from people. We do not use these cookies for advertising.
• Cloudflare may add network-error reporting headers, which ask supporting browsers to send network diagnostic reports to Cloudflare. These reports concern connection reliability and can include the requested URL and network conditions. They do not upload your music or projects.

Browser-local audio processing does not mean visiting the site is anonymous: hosting and these network features involve ordinary web requests. They do not give us access to your locally generated audio or recipes.

Direct purchases and license recovery

When direct checkout is available, it identifies the seller and payment provider before you pay. Stripe Managed Payments processes payment and billing details under its own terms and privacy policy. We do not receive or store your full card number or security code.

Our purchase service stores your purchase email address, provider and order identifiers, payment reference, purchase date, amount and currency, billing country, payment and refund status, dispute and other purchase-review holds, and signed license in a Cloudflare D1 database. It also keeps email-delivery status and the records needed to protect and retry delivery. We use these records to fulfill the purchase, recover licenses, answer billing questions, prevent abuse and maintain business records. We retain them for those purposes and any applicable legal record-keeping requirements.

Purchase-service diagnostics. Operational logs can include purchase and delivery identifiers, Stripe request identifiers, request paths, response status and error codes. Delivery identifiers can include a license identifier. These records help us investigate failed purchases and deliveries; they are separate from the purchase database and can be associated with purchase records.

Abuse prevention. To limit excessive checkout, purchase status and recovery requests, our service uses request IP addresses and, for recovery, the entered email address to produce secret-derived hashes. The rate-limit records contain these hashes, request counts and expiry times rather than the raw IP address or email address. Hashing is not anonymization; separate purchase records still contain your email and our hosting providers receive network information. These controls are used for security and delivery, not advertising.

Purchase terms. Stripe keeps the checkout agreement result and the application-terms version associated with your purchase. Our license email includes a link to that preserved version, and our delivery records retain the original email message so recovery can preserve that link. We use these records to document the purchase agreement and answer purchase-related questions.

The Windows interest list

If you ask to hear when a Windows version is released, we store the email address you entered, a random confirmation token, the time you asked, and which part of the site you asked from. Nothing else – no name, and no record of your address beyond that row.

The address is not added to the list until you click the link in the confirmation email, so an address entered by someone else never joins it. We use the list for one announcement, when the Windows version is released, and for nothing else. Every message carries a way to leave the list, and we delete the list once that announcement has been sent. You can ask us to remove your address before then at any time.

Resend sends purchase and recovery emails on our behalf, and the confirmation and announcement emails for the Windows interest list. Purchase and recovery emails include your license as an attachment and a link to download the app; the Windows-list emails carry neither. Resend processes the recipient address, email content, license attachment and delivery information needed to send the message. License recovery uses the email address associated with the purchase; it does not create a customer password. For multiple purchases using the same email, the service selects the most recent purchase currently eligible for recovery. Our recovery page does not reveal whether an entered address has purchased the app.

Mac App Store purchases

For copies acquired through the Mac App Store, Apple handles your Apple Account, payment details, billing address and purchase history under Apple's Privacy Policy. We do not receive your payment information, name, email address or Apple Account identifier from an App Store purchase.

What Apple does pass to us is limited to:

• Aggregate sales and analytics reports – counts of units, refunds, territories, device types and app usage, presented as totals rather than individual purchase records.
• Crash reports – if, and only if, you have turned on “Share with App Developers” in your macOS Analytics & Improvements settings. These contain technical diagnostic information about the crash. We use them solely to fix bugs. You can turn this off at any time in System Settings.
• App Store ratings and reviews – which are public, and show whatever display name you chose to publish them under.

If you contact us

If you email underscoremusicapp@gmail.com for support or any other reason, we receive your email address, your name if you give it, and whatever is in your message, including projects, audio, screenshots, logs or other attachments you choose to send. We may read or open those materials to investigate your request. Send only files you are comfortable sharing and have permission to share. That address is a Gmail account, so your message is stored on Google's servers and handled under Google's privacy policy as well as this one. We keep that correspondence so that we can answer you and maintain a record of our dealings with you. Retention is described below.

What we never do

• We do not sell, rent, or trade personal information. We never have and we will not.
• We do not share your information with third parties for their own marketing.
• We do not build advertising profiles, and there is no advertising in the app or on this site.
• We do not track you across other websites or applications.
• The app and Undercurrent do not automatically upload your samples, projects, recipes or generated audio to us. Files you voluntarily send to support are handled as described above.

Service providers

The following providers support website and update hosting, purchase processing, license delivery and support:

• Apple – Mac App Store distribution, payment and optional crash reporting for that distribution channel.
• Cloudflare – website, installer and software-update hosting, the purchase service and its D1 purchase and delivery database. Cloudflare's Privacy Policy.
• Resend – license and recovery emails, including license attachments, and the Windows interest list's confirmation and announcement emails. Resend's Privacy Policy.
• Stripe Managed Payments – direct-payment processing and order records, as described above.
• Google – our support address is a Gmail account, so Google delivers and stores correspondence sent to it, and handles it under Google's Privacy Policy.

We do not use advertising, customer profiling or session-recording services. The only marketing email we send is to people who asked for it: the Windows interest list described above, which is confirmed opt-in and is used for one announcement and nothing else. This does not exclude the host's aggregate traffic and performance information or Apple's aggregate reports described above.

Retention

We retain purchase, license and delivery records as needed to provide license recovery, answer support and billing questions, prevent abuse, resolve disputes and meet applicable business and legal record-keeping requirements. Support correspondence and attachments are kept for as long as needed for those support and record-keeping purposes. The applicable period depends on the record and purpose; there is no single deletion deadline for all of these records or their backups.

Rate-limit records have short expiry windows: approximately two minutes for purchase-status requests, thirty minutes for checkout and recovery IP limits, and two hours for recovery-email limits. Scheduled cleanup removes expired rate-limit records; an expiry is not a guarantee of immediate deletion. A purchase-page access token expires after seven days, but expiry does not itself delete the associated purchase or access record. Our service providers retain their own operational records under their applicable terms and policies. You can contact us about retention or request deletion, subject to applicable rights and records we need to retain.

Legal bases

Where the UK GDPR or EU GDPR applies, we process purchase, delivery and license-recovery information as necessary to perform our contract with you or take steps you request before entering that contract (Article 6(1)(b)). We rely on legitimate interests in operating and securing our services, preventing abuse, answering correspondence and maintaining necessary business records (Article 6(1)(f)), where those interests are not overridden by your rights and interests. If consent is required for particular processing, we will request it and explain how to withdraw it. Payment providers and Apple explain their own processing and legal bases in their policies.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to request access to the personal information we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to or restrict our processing of it, to receive a portable copy, and to withdraw consent where we relied on it. If you are in California, you additionally have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights; note that we do not sell or share personal information as the CCPA defines those terms, so there is nothing to opt out of.

Information we hold may include direct-purchase and license-delivery records as well as support correspondence. To exercise any right, email underscoremusicapp@gmail.com and we will respond within the time the applicable law allows. If you are in the EEA or UK and are unhappy with our response, you may complain to your national supervisory authority.

Children

Underscore is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. This applies to our website, direct-purchase service and support correspondence.

International transfers

We are based in the United States, and our providers operate globally. Information may be processed in the United States and other countries where we or our providers operate; support email is not guaranteed to remain in a single country. Our providers describe their international processing and transfer safeguards in their linked privacy policies. For example, Google describes its arrangements in its international data-transfer information. Contact us for information about the arrangements applicable to your information.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of the page. If a change is significant, we will explain it here and, where it affects the application, in the app's release notes before it takes effect.

Contact

The Undernet LLC
Chicago, Illinois, United States
underscoremusicapp@gmail.com