Privacy

The short version

• No account is required.
• No notes, chords or audio are uploaded to a server.
• No analytics, advertising or tracking scripts are included.
• The rating system uses a first-party cookie to remember your rating.
• Your theme choice and optional last search are stored in your browser’s local storage.
• Share links put the musical state in the URL fragment, after the#, not in a server query.

What is stored in your browser

The site uses local storage for these optional conveniences:

• Theme preference — the key free-scale-finder:theme stores “light” or “dark”.
• Recent search — the key free-scale-finder:last-state:v1 stores a share-style hash with your last note set, tonic, matching mode, selected scale, instrument and left-handed preference. It is written only after you enter notes or select a scale.
• Rating prompt — a dismissal date prevents another automatic request for 30 days. Session storage keeps only the accumulated visible time used for the delayed prompt.

Local storage stays on your device and is not sent to this site’s server. You can remove it with the “Forget saved session” button in the tool, or by clearing site data in your browser. Clearing site data also removes the theme and rating-prompt preferences.

Share links

When you copy a share link, the musical state is encoded in the URL fragment, for example #n=C,E,G&m=contains. URL fragments are processed by the browser and are not sent in the HTTP request for the page. The link is not a separate indexable page.

Anyone you send the link to can see the notes and settings encoded in it. Do not put private information into the note input. The site only accepts musical state that passes its parser; malformed values are rejected instead of being applied.

Server and hosting data

Music analysis runs locally in your browser. The separate rating service stores submitted stars and dates in a shared database. The hosting provider may receive standard request information such as an IP address, user agent and requested URL in its server logs. That is a function of the host, not an analytics service added by this project.

The project does not sell data, share data with advertisers, or use data to build profiles. There are no third-party embeds in the tool itself.

Visitor ratings

Submitting a rating sends only your chosen stars to the rating service. Stars and dates are public on the ratings page. Names, email addresses, musical inputs and audio files are not included. A random, signed first-party cookie remembers your browser for up to one year so an update replaces its previous rating. The database stores a keyed identifier, not the cookie itself.

For basic abuse prevention, the service keeps a daily keyed hash of the network address and a request count. These identifiers expire after two days and are removed on the next rating submission. It does not store the raw address in the ratings database. Clearing site cookies makes this browser appear new; it does not delete a rating already submitted. These ratings are visitor feedback, not verified purchases.

Audio

Scale playback is synthesized in your browser with the Web Audio API and starts only after you press a play button. No microphone is requested. The audio finder reads files you choose and analyzes them locally, one at a time. Audio and filenames are not uploaded or saved to browser storage. Reset clears the current batch. CSV export downloads only the results when you request it; opening a scale shares only its musical settings.

Contact

A public contact address is configured separately from this privacy page. If no address is shown on the contact page, this build has not been configured with a monitored inbox yet.

Changes

If the data practices change, this page must be updated before the change is published. Adding analytics, advertising, accounts, a contact-form backend or a third-party service would require a revised privacy notice and, where applicable, consent.