Know every song that played.

It listens. Here is exactly what it keeps.

An app that holds a microphone open for hours owes you a straight answer about where the sound goes.

• The sound itself never leaves. Your phone turns what it hears into a fingerprint on the device and sends only that — never the audio — to Apple's Shazam service to be matched. The audio it fingerprinted is dropped on the spot.
• Audio is kept only where you'll be asked to judge it — one short clip for each song it was unsure about, and each moment it couldn't name. They stay on your phone, delete themselves when you finish reviewing the set (or after 30 days if you never do), and leave the device only if you deliberately share one. The one exception is a clip you tap Keep clip on: that one is yours until you delete it.
• When a match can't be made right then — no signal, or the service not answering — that stretch of audio waits on the phone until it can be identified, and is deleted the moment it is. That's the price of not losing it.
• An account is real, and it's for friends. Capturing, reviewing, your library and exporting need no sign-up and no password, and opening a night someone shares with you needs nothing at all. Signing in (Apple or Google) is what backs your friend code, your friends list and your share links, so they survive a new phone — and adding a friend is the one thing that asks for it. Signing in picks your @username too — the server holds it, it's how friends find you, and you can change it later (once every 30 days) — along with a display name if you add one, and a profile whose counters you can switch off. Once you have friends, a finished night goes to them unless you switch that off — Catchy asks the first time it happens, and any night can be unshared. Your audio never leaves either way.
• No analytics SDK, no tracking, no location. Our server does the connecting — friend links, invitations, the pages you share — and never sees your audio, or the name of a night you didn't share (a private night sends only the capture diagnostics below, as catalog IDs and times — and an Insights question when you ask one). Export to Spotify without your own account and a random install ID goes along, so that shared account can't be abused; it's tied to nothing about you and resets if you reinstall.
• Capture diagnostics, which you can switch off. After a night is reviewed, the app sends what its Capture health panel shows: counters, and the per-window recognition events — which catalog songs were recognized and when, as catalog identifiers and numbers. Never audio, never a recording, never song titles or set names. It exists to fix how nights get recognized. Switching it off deletes what was sent; deleting a night deletes that night's rows.
• Ask about an artist, and that one question leaves the phone. Open a song's card and Catchy starts the ✦ Insights lookup so the answer is ready if you tap: the song's title and artist go to our server, and the artist's name to MusicBrainz, the public music encyclopedia, to make sure it's the right one. Any night, shared or private — it's you asking about an artist, not the night reporting itself, and nothing else about the night goes along.

The full privacy policy →