ihateaudio

Privacy

The short version: your files never leave your device, and there is nothing here to sign up for.

What happens to your audio

When you drop a file onto any tool on this site, your browser reads it from your own disk into the memory of that tab. All decoding, editing and encoding happens there, using audio features built into the browser itself. The finished file is written back out by the same tab and saved straight to your downloads folder.

At no point is your audio transmitted anywhere. There is no upload step, no processing server, and no storage bucket, not because we delete files quickly, but because they are never sent in the first place. Closing the tab discards everything.

How to verify that yourself

Do not take our word for it. Two checks, either of which is conclusive:

What we do collect

Page analytics, through Google Analytics and PostHog: which pages were viewed, roughly which country from, and which site sent you. On a tool page we also record three things about what happened, and only these three: that a file was accepted, which output format you chose, and the error code if something failed. It exists so we know which tools are worth more work and which ones are quietly broken.

What is deliberately switched off is worth more than what is on. There is no session recording, because a replay of a tool page would capture your filenames, and a filename is content. Nothing you type is captured. No file name, no file size and no audio ever reaches either service. We set no cookie of our own; Google Analytics sets its own, which is the honest cost of using it. Advertising and remarketing signals are turned off.

If your browser sends Do Not Track, PostHog collects nothing at all. Any blocker will stop both, and every tool keeps working exactly the same, because none of this is load bearing.

There are no accounts, so there is no email address, password, or profile to leak. There is no advertising, so no advertising network receives anything about you.

The one network request worth explaining

Most tools need nothing beyond the page itself. A few output formats (M4A, OGG, FLAC, WMA, AIFF and iPhone ringtones) require a converter that is too large to include in every page, so it downloads on demand the first time you use one, from this site's own servers.

That download goes one way: code comes to you, and your audio still does not go anywhere. It is also the only third-party-free way to do it, the converter is hosted here rather than pulled from someone else's CDN, precisely so no other company sees that you requested it.

Local storage

If you use the "keep going" links after exporting a file, the result is held in memory and handed to the next tool so you do not have to select it again. A short-lived token in your browser's session storage links the two. It is cleared when you close the tab and contains no audio itself.

Installing the site as an app caches the pages so it works offline. That cache holds only the site's own code, never your files.

Changes

If this ever changes in a way that affects what happens to your files, it will be stated plainly on the affected tool page, not buried here.