We don't watch you play

Ferric is a line of music instruments made by Ferric Instrument Works in San Diego, California. This policy covers the apps, this website, and the mailing list. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

The instruments

The apps collect nothing. There is no analytics package, no telemetry, no crash reporter, no advertising identifier, no third-party SDK of any kind. There is no account, and there is no Ferric server for your data to go to, because we do not run one.

• Audio never leaves your device. Microphone and instrument input are processed on the device, in the moment. So is every file L–1 reads — see reading your library below. Nothing is uploaded, ever.
• T–2 records nothing at all. The tuner listens and shows you a pitch. It does not keep what it heard.
• Your recordings and presets are your files. They live in your device's storage and, where you enable it, in your own iCloud container — which is Apple's service and your account, not ours. We cannot see inside it.
• The apps work fully offline. No license check, no phone-home, no server call. If this shop shut down tomorrow, everything you own would keep working.

What the App Store tells us

When you buy from Apple, Apple is the seller. They give us anonymous, aggregate sales and download counts — units by country, that kind of thing. We never receive your name, email, or payment details, and there is no way for us to connect a purchase to a person.

Reading your library (L–1)

L–1 opens the audio you point it at and works out what is in it — tempo, key, the chords, what kind of sound it is, and the words if anybody is singing. That is more than most apps do with your files, so here is exactly what happens and where.

• All of it runs on your device. The musical analysis is ordinary signal processing, running locally. The transcription uses Apple's on-device speech recognition, and it is pinned on-device in code — if a device cannot do it locally, L–1 returns no words rather than sending your audio somewhere that can.
• It only uses language models your system already has. A scan never downloads one behind your back. Where L–1 suggests a title from what you sang, that is Apple's on-device model — it runs locally or it does not run.
• Nothing you own trains anything. Not a model of ours — we do not have one — and nothing is passed to anybody else's. Your recordings, your lyrics and your transcripts are never training data.
• There is no network code in the app at all. Not disabled, not behind a switch: L–1 contains no networking of any kind, so there is no path for your library to leave by.
• Transcription asks first. macOS and iOS prompt you before any speech recognition happens. Say no and the scan still runs — it simply reads tempo and key and leaves the words alone.

What the scan writes

The scan changes your files, and you should know that up front. What it learns is written into each file's own metadata — the standard tag fields, the same place a DJ program keeps cue points. The audio itself is never altered, and the file's creation date is preserved. We do it this way so the information belongs to the file rather than to us: move it, rename it, or open it in another app years from now and it still knows what it is.

Anything you type — a title, a corrected key, tags, lyrics — is yours and the app never overwrites it, on any later scan. L–1 also keeps a working index outside your library so searching is fast; it holds nothing that is not already in your files, it is never the authority on anything, and you can delete it at any moment with no loss.

This website

The site is static files on Cloudflare Pages. There is no analytics and there are no advertising or tracking cookies. Cloudflare keeps standard edge logs — IP address, user agent, which file was requested — for security and abuse prevention, as any web host does. We do not build profiles from them and we do not sell anything to anyone.

The T–2 page has a working tuner in it. If you press MIC, your browser asks your permission and the audio is analysed in the page, on your machine. Nothing is recorded, and nothing is transmitted. Deny the permission and the page runs a demo instead.

The mailing list

If you give us your email address, we use it to send bench notes and release news, and nothing else. The list runs on Buttondown, who process it on our behalf.

• Double opt-in — you confirm before you are on it.
• Unsubscribe in one click, in every message.
• We never sell, rent, or share the list.
• Ask us to delete you and we delete you.

Children

The instruments are rated 4+ and are safe for anyone, because they collect nothing from anyone. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children — or, for that matter, from adults.

Your rights

Under the GDPR, the CCPA and similar laws you have the right to know what is held about you, to get a copy, and to have it deleted. In our case the answer is short: unless you joined the mailing list, we hold nothing about you at all. If you are on the list, write to us and we will show you the record or delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top, and material changes go out on the mailing list. We will not quietly start collecting things.

Contact

Questions about any of this: [email protected]. General help lives on the support page.