Privacy
karanow is a macOS app that separates vocals from audio on your own machine. This page describes exactly what it processes, what it keeps, and the short list of things that leave your Mac.
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.
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 or Google, 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.
In mainland China the year is paid once, also through Stripe, by Alipay or WeChat Pay, and nothing renews. In every case Stripe holds the payment details; karanow never sees them.
Analytics
karanow contains no analytics SDK and no usage tracking. If it quits unexpectedly, the next launch offers to send the crash report macOS already wrote. Nothing is sent unless you choose to. The report holds the crash site only — no song names, recordings or account — and goes to karanow’s own server, never a third party. Settings lets you always send or never be asked. The app’s network destinations are the lyrics service, karanow’s own entitlement API, that crash-report endpoint when you consent, and Stripe’s checkout page in your browser.
That is the app. The website counts button presses, described below.
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.
The site does count which buttons get pressed — play, remove the vocal, switching demo tracks, and download — so we can tell which parts of the page are doing their job. This is our own counter, not a third party's. Each page load makes a random number that lives only in the browser's memory for that visit: it is never stored on your device, and two visits can never be joined up. What is recorded is the button, the page language, which demo track, your country, and whether the device is a desktop or a phone. No IP address, no browser fingerprint, no profile. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, nothing is sent and nothing is recorded.
If you sign up for the Windows waiting list on the home page, we store the address you typed, the topic you asked about, the page language, your country, and the time. That is what is needed to send the message you asked for and nothing more. The address is never shared with anyone. Every email carries an unsubscribe link, and writing to us removes it as well.
Your choices
Delete a recording from the recordings window or the Finder at any time. 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: