Privacy
Short version: Menu Band only phones home for two things — a version check, and a crash report you have to send by hand.
What Menu Band collects
Nothing about you. No analytics, no usage telemetry, no automatic crash reporting, no account, no identifiers. The two network requests Menu Band makes are listed below in full.
Network requests Menu Band makes
- Update check (automatic). Menu Band fetches a small JSON manifest from
https://assets.aesthetic.computer/menuband/latest.jsonto find out whether a newer version exists. The request happens at most once an hour and includes only what your operating system attaches to any HTTP request (your IP address and a genericURLSessionuser-agent). It contains no identifier for you, your Mac, or your install. If a newer version is published, the popover shows a small banner; nothing is downloaded or installed automatically. - Crash report upload (manual, button-press). If macOS has captured a Menu Band crash log in
~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/, the popover shows a count and a Send button. Clicking Send POSTs the contents of that crash file (a standard Apple.ips/.crashdiagnostic, which contains stack traces and runtime info but no documents you've authored) tohttps://aesthetic.computer/menuband-logs. The request also includes the Menu Band version string and the crash filename so we can group reports. Menu Band never uploads a crash report without you clicking Send.
That's the complete list. There are no other network requests.
What Menu Band stores locally
A handful of preferences in UserDefaults on your own Mac: which input mode you last used, the selected General MIDI patch, the octave shift, and whether MIDI output is enabled. None of this leaves your machine.
Permissions Menu Band may request
Accessibility access. Asked for only when you turn on the Notepat or Ableton input modes. macOS requires this permission for any app that wants to receive global keystrokes (the rest of the time, your typing goes wherever it normally goes). Menu Band uses keystrokes solely to play notes; nothing is recorded, logged, or transmitted.
Third parties
The two endpoints above are operated by aesthetic.computer; the manifest is served from Cloudflare's CDN in front of our DigitalOcean Spaces bucket and the crash endpoint is served from our own VPS. There are no third-party analytics, advertising, or data-sharing services. Audio and MIDI use only Apple's built-in CoreMIDI and AVAudioEngine. The virtual MIDI source named Menu Band is published to your Mac's CoreMIDI server so DAWs on your Mac can receive notes — that traffic is local-only.
Children
Menu Band does not collect data about users, so there is nothing to disclose about users of any age.
Changes
If anything else ever leaves your Mac (say, an opt-in cloud feature), this page will be updated and the change called out in the app's release notes. The default will always be: as little as possible, and never without your knowledge.
Contact
Email: [email protected] · Web: aesthetic.computer