Vespertine collects nothing.
Effective 2 October 2026 (clarified what each service receives; nothing new is sent)
Vespertine is a free, open-source music player. It has no accounts, no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting and no advertising. The developer receives no information about you or your music. Because the source code is public, you can check every statement on this page.
What stays on your Mac
Your library database, playlists, play counts, file analysis results, artwork cache and settings are stored in your user Library on your Mac. Passwords for network shares and your ListenBrainz token, if you add one, are stored in the macOS Keychain. None of it is uploaded anywhere.
When the app goes online
- Update checks. Vespertine asks GitHub for its update feed about once a day, and when you choose Check for Updates. GitHub sees your IP address, as with any download. You can turn automatic checks off in Settings.
- MusicBrainz and Cover Art Archive. Only when you use Look Up on MusicBrainz or Enrich Metadata (Find Music on This Mac offers Enrich for the music it adds, as a checkbox you can clear), Vespertine sends the album, artist and track names it's looking for to musicbrainz.org. With “Fetch cover art” on in Settings, it downloads covers from coverartarchive.org, which serves them from the Internet Archive (archive.org). MusicBrainz and the Cover Art Archive are run by the MetaBrainz Foundation.
- ListenBrainz. Only if you turn on scrobbling and enter your token, Vespertine sends listenbrainz.org the songs you play: title, artist, album, duration and their MusicBrainz IDs when your files have them. It sends “playing now” when a song starts, and a listen with its time once you've heard half of it or four minutes.
- Network shares. Vespertine connects to the servers you add, and nowhere else, to read your music. While a share is connected it checks every minute or so that the server still answers, and looks for new music every half hour (never while you're playing from it).
This website
This site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which may log visitors' IP addresses; see GitHub's privacy statement. The page asks GitHub's API for the latest version number to label the download button. It sets no cookies, loads its fonts from this site, and uses no analytics.
Changes and contact
If this ever changes, this page and the release notes will say so first. Questions are welcome as a GitHub issue.