Your library, your control, better together.
Your Library Stays Local
CrateSense runs a local agent on your machine that scans and analyzes your music library. Your audio files never leave your computer. The agent extracts metadata (artist, title, duration) and computes audio fingerprints locally.
What Gets Synced
When you sync, only derived data is transmitted to the CrateSense cloud:
- Metadata: artist name, track title, duration, identifiers (ISRC, catalog number)
- Audio fingerprints: short mathematical hashes computed from your audio. These are one-way and cannot be used to reconstruct or play back any audio.
- Your taste profile: statistical summaries of your collection for recommendation matching
What is never transmitted:
- Audio files or audio data of any kind
- File paths or folder names from your computer
- Any binary data
The Shared Music Catalog
Your derived metadata contributes to a shared music identity database that benefits all CrateSense users. Think of it like a community-built MusicBrainz or Discogs, where every DJ's collection helps improve the accuracy of the catalog for everyone.
How this helps you:
- Better metadata: when another DJ has the same track with better tags, the shared catalog fills in your gaps
- Smarter recommendations: more data means more accurate matching and discovery
- Collection intelligence: "DJs with similar taste also have..." becomes possible as the community grows
Your Control
- You can disable catalog contribution in your settings at any time. Your agent will still sync your personal profile for recommendations, but won't contribute to the shared catalog.
- You can request deletion of all your observation records from the shared database. We'll remove your contribution trail and adjust the catalog accordingly.
- You can export your data at any time by contacting us.
The Derived-Only Contract
This isn't just a policy — it's enforced in code at multiple levels:
1. Agent (your machine) — strips file paths, computes fingerprints locally
2. API guard — rejects any payload containing file paths, audio data, or binary content
3. Architecture — cloud database schema has no field for raw audio or file paths
For full details, see our Terms of Service and Privacy Notice.