Privacy

9xLyrics watches what you are listening to. That is worth being precise about.

Your account is a number

No email address, no password, no profile. Creating an account mints a twelve-digit number, and that number is the account. There is nothing in it to leak and no address to send anything to.

The cost is that losing the number loses the licence — there is no recovery, because there is nothing to recover from. See Your UID and devices.

Detection never leaves your computer

Reading what is playing uses your operating system's own interfaces — the system Now Playing information on macOS, media sessions on Windows, MPRIS on Linux. Nothing about it is sent anywhere.

Your Library stays on this computer

The Library keeps a list of songs you played, songs you identified and lines you starred, so you can open them again. It is stored in the app's data folder on this computer and is never sent anywhere — not to us, not to lyric sources.

• Settings › Lyrics › Remember played songs turns recording off.
• Clear history empties the list of played songs.
• Clear lyrics cache does not touch the Library or your saved lines.

Lyrics you save or edit yourself are kept on this computer in the same way.

Local music and metadata

Songs indexes audio files on your computer. Whole-computer scanning is on by default; turn it off in Songs › Folders to scan only folders you choose. The index and extracted covers stay in the app data on this computer. Audio files are played locally and are not uploaded or rewritten.

For audio without artist tags, a cleaned filename can be sent to Deezer or iTunes to find matching song details and artwork. This is separate from playback detection and lyric lookups. These catalogues have their own privacy practices.

What a lyric lookup sends

To find lyrics for a song, 9xLyrics asks lyric sources for that song. The request carries what identifies it — title, artist, album and length — and nothing else. No account number, no machine identifier, no history.

The sources are third-party lyric databases, each with its own practices, and a lookup reaches them the same way any search would.

What a YouTube link sends

YouTube link… in Search lyrics asks YouTube for the captions of the video you pasted. No account number and no listening history go with it. If you use the captions, they are kept as that song's lyrics on this computer.

What Identify Song sends

Identify Song uses your microphone during recognition attempts you start, or attempts scheduled by automatic listening if you enable it. The app shows when it is listening. It does not record continuously.

On Windows and Linux the recorded audio is turned into a fingerprint on your machine, and only that fingerprint is sent — never the audio. On macOS recognition is handled by Apple's own Shazam integration through Shortcuts, so it follows Apple's terms rather than ours.

Nothing is recorded between attempts, and nothing is kept afterwards.

Album art

Covers come from the player where it provides one, and are looked up from public music catalogues where it does not. They are cached on your machine so the same cover is not fetched twice.

Settings stay where they are

Every setting is stored locally, per machine. They are not synced, not backed up to a server, and not readable by us. One account across two computers keeps two separate sets.

Licence checks

The app asks whether your number has a licence. That check carries the number and a device identifier — enough to count devices against the limit and no more.

A temporary connection problem does not automatically sign you out. Pro features still require an active trial or paid access.

Diagnostics

Logs are written to a file on your machine for troubleshooting and are never sent anywhere on their own. If support asks for one, sending it is your choice and your action.

The formal version

The 123sudo privacy policy covers the account system across all 123sudo apps. This page describes what 9xLyrics specifically does.