Privacy Policy
Effective September 27, 2026
Crate Roulette doesn’t collect any information about you. There are no accounts, no ads, no analytics and no tracking, and your crate stays on your phone. To look records up it asks three public music databases, and this page says exactly what it tells them.
- Nothing collectedYour crate never leaves your phone.
- No trackingNo analytics, ads or third-party code.
- Three lookupsMusicBrainz, the Cover Art Archive and Discogs.
What Crate Roulette keeps on your phone
The records you add, with what the app looked up about them: title, artist, year, label, catalogue number, barcode, tracklist and sides, and genres. It also keeps what you tell it: the shelf and rooms you choose, your ratings, and each spin (when you dropped the needle on a record). Cover images it has downloaded are kept too, so the crate shows its art offline.
All of it stays in the app’s own storage on your iPhone. None of it is sent anywhere, apart from the lookups described below, and none of it syncs to iCloud. Removing a record removes it, and deleting the app deletes everything. Like the rest of your phone’s data, it is included in your device backups.
Looking records up
To find a record and fill in its details, Crate Roulette asks these services:
- MusicBrainz (musicbrainz.org, run by the MetaBrainz Foundation): the words you type into search, a barcode you scan, and the IDs of records on your shelf: MusicBrainz’s own, or, for a pressing found on Discogs, its Discogs ID, to find the same record in MusicBrainz. That gets back titles, pressings, tracklists and genres.
- Cover Art Archive (coverartarchive.org, also MetaBrainz): the MusicBrainz ID of a record, to fetch its cover.
- Discogs (discogs.com): a barcode MusicBrainz couldn’t answer, a record’s catalogue number and artist (to find which tracks are on which side), and the Discogs ID of a pressing it found. The request carries the app’s own Discogs key, which identifies Crate Roulette, not you.
Some of these run in the background for records already on your shelf, for example to fetch a cover again or fill in details a newer version of the app uses. They are the same kind of request.
None of these requests carries your name, an account or a device identifier. Each one names the app, as these services ask apps to. Like any request on the internet, it shows your IP address to the service answering it, which handles it under its own policy: MetaBrainz and Discogs.
The camera
Scanning a barcode uses the camera, only while the scanner is open and only after you allow it. The barcode is read on your phone. No photo or video is saved or sent. Only the barcode’s number goes to the lookups above.
Playing your crate on CoverUp
If you also use CoverUp, tapping Play your crate on CoverUp hands the albums on your shelf to it so you can play them. For each album that means its MusicBrainz ID, title, artist, first release year and genres, the shelf if you chose it yourself, and a copy of its cover. The two apps pass them through a private folder on your iPhone that only they can open, so nothing goes over the internet.
Your spins, ratings, barcodes, catalogue numbers and anything that came from Discogs are not included. The folder holds the crate you last handed over until you tap the button again, which replaces it, or until both apps are deleted. What CoverUp does with it is in CoverUp’s privacy policy.
What Crate Roulette doesn’t do
- It has no accounts or sign-in.
- It contains no analytics, advertising or tracking, and no third-party SDKs.
- It doesn’t ask for your location, contacts, microphone, photos or music library.
- It doesn’t sell, rent or share information, because it has none to share.
Information Apple provides
Crate Roulette is distributed through Apple, which collects some information under its own privacy policy and may pass a limited amount of it to developers. That includes crash reports and usage statistics from people who have chosen to share them with developers. For TestFlight testers it also includes your name and email address if you were invited by email, install and session counts, and any feedback or screenshots you decide to send.
I use this only to fix problems and improve the app. I don’t sell it or share it with anyone.
Children
Crate Roulette doesn’t collect personal information from anyone, including children.
Changes to this policy
If a future version of Crate Roulette ever needs to collect anything, or to send something new to the services above, this page will be updated before that version is released, and the effective date at the top will change.
Contact
Crate Roulette is made by David Wageman. Questions about this policy can go to dwageman@outlook.com.