Privacy

Audio

Audio captured from the source application and from your microphone is processed entirely on your Mac, inside a rolling in-memory window. It is not written to disk and it is not uploaded. When the window advances, the old audio is gone.

The single exception is a recording you start yourself. Pressing the record button writes that take to an m4a file on your Mac and nowhere else. You can play it back or delete it from the recordings window, or reveal it in the Finder and delete it there.

The separation model (HTDemucs) and the pitch model both run locally. There is no server-side audio processing, and no version of karanow sends audio anywhere.

Song details and lyrics

When the source application publishes what it is playing, karanow sends the title, artist, album and duration to third-party lyrics providers to find matching lyrics. No audio, and no identifier of yours, is included in these requests.

Matched lyrics are cached on your Mac for 30 days.

If you switch on transcription in Settings → Lyrics, Apple Speech writes down the separated vocal entirely on your device (macOS 26 or later). This is off by default. The resulting text is stored in a local cache encrypted with an AES-GCM key held in your keychain and marked ThisDeviceOnly, so it does not sync to iCloud and does not restore onto another Mac. Only the recognised text and song timestamps are stored — never audio.

Pitch data

Each song’s pitch contour is cached locally so the runway can show the line ahead on later plays. The cache holds timestamps, MIDI pitch values and confidence figures. It contains no audio samples and is never uploaded.

Account and subscription

You can use the 7-day trial with no account at all — the start time is written to this Mac’s keychain.

If you sign in with Apple, karanow’s server records your entitlement so trials and subscriptions follow you between Macs. Your Apple user identifier is hashed with a server-held HMAC secret before it is stored. We do not store your email address, your name, or the raw Apple user identifier. Apple’s Hide My Email is fully supported because we never need the address in the first place.

Your session token is stored in the macOS keychain. Entitlements are refreshed when the app launches, when it returns to the foreground, and every five minutes while running.

Payments

Purchases made from this website are processed by Stripe. Stripe receives and holds your payment details; karanow never sees a card number. We store the Stripe customer and subscription identifiers needed to keep your entitlement accurate and to revoke it if a purchase is refunded.

Purchases made in the Mac App Store version are processed by Apple through StoreKit under Apple’s own privacy terms. karanow verifies the signed transaction and stores the resulting entitlement.

Analytics

There are none. karanow contains no analytics SDK, no crash reporter and no usage tracking. The only network destinations in the app are the lyrics providers, karanow’s own entitlement API, and Apple’s subscription management page when you ask to open it.

This website

karanow.com is a static site served by Cloudflare. It sets no cookies other than one that remembers your language choice, and it embeds no third-party analytics, advertising or social scripts. Cloudflare processes request logs as part of serving and protecting the site.

Your choices

Delete a recording from the recordings window or the Finder at any time. Turn transcription off — or leave it off, which is the default. Delete the lyric and pitch caches by removing karanow’s Application Support folder. Sign out to remove the session from your keychain, and write to us to have the entitlement record for your hashed identifier deleted.

Contact

Questions about any of this, or a deletion request:

support@karanow.com