Licence agreement
Version 2026-09-02 — Sonsei.
Sonsei is not on sale yet — there is no checkout to take your money today. These terms are published in advance so you can read them before the storefront opens, and they take effect for orders placed from that day.
This is the agreement between you and Future Dynamic (The Netherlands) about how you may use Sonsei. It is written to be read. Where it grants you something, it grants it in plain words; where it relies on you rather than on the software to hold a line, it says so.
1. What you get
When you buy Sonsei you receive a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, personal licence to install and use the version you bought (see §4), for your own work — commercial or not, on your own records or on clients’. There is no subscription, no renewal and no expiry date: the licence you bought does not stop working.
- Install it on every computer you own or control. The licence is tied to you, not to a machine — your studio desktop, your laptop and a rebuilt system all count as the same licence. There is no activation limit in the software, and we are not going to add one to a product that is sold on not phoning home.
- One person per licence. The licence covers you. If a second engineer uses Sonsei for their own work, that is a second licence, whatever machine it runs on. Nothing in the code checks this; it is the one place this agreement asks for your good faith rather than enforcing a rule.
- All formats, one licence: VST3, Audio Units (AU), Standalone. Activating once licenses all of them, because they share a single licence file.
- It keeps working offline. The plug-in verifies your licence on your own machine, against a key built into the binary. It does not contact a server to check whether you are allowed to run it — not at install, not at start-up, not ever. A studio with no internet, or a company that no longer exists, cannot take away what you bought.
2. The trial
Before you buy anything you can run Sonsei free for 30 days, and those days are the real product:
- Full-function, not a crippled demo. Nothing is disabled, nothing is time-limited within a session, there is no noise burst and no output mute. The value here is the counsel, so you evaluate the counsel.
- 30 days from first run — measured from the day you first open the plug-in, not from download. It runs one trial per machine, stored with your local preferences.
- The clock only moves forward. The plug-in records the latest date it has ever seen and never accepts an earlier one, so setting your system clock back does not extend the trial. That watermark is stored locally with the trial start date; nothing about it is sent anywhere.
- When the trial ends, the plug-in still opens. Your journal, your saved takes, the interface and your settings all stay available. What stops is the counsel — the analysis and the advice — and it stops before a take is analysed rather than after. Buying a licence turns it back on with no reinstall and nothing lost.
- One trial, honestly. Reinstalling to reset the trial, or working around the date watermark, is a breach of this agreement even where it is technically possible.
3. Your licence file
Your licence is a small signed file (.sonsei-license). You activate it once, from the plug-in’s About panel, and it is stored with your Sonsei preferences. It records your order reference and the edition you bought (§4) — nothing about your computer, and nothing about what you do with the plug-in. It reaches you in one of two ways:
- Bought from us directly: we email it to you after your order, and it also carries the name and email address you bought under.
- Bought through a marketplace: the shop hands you a one-time redemption code instead, which you exchange for your file on our redeem page. That file is a bearer licence — it was signed before we knew who would buy it, so it carries no name or email, only its batch and order reference. Receiving it that way is exactly how it is meant to be delivered, and it grants everything a named licence grants, permanently.
Keep it the way you would keep a receipt. If you lose it, mail support@sonseiaudio.com — from the address you bought with, or with your marketplace order details — and we will re-issue it: free, as often as you genuinely need it. Treat the file as personal. Anyone holding a copy can activate the plug-in with it, so posting or sharing it is a breach of §5 — and if it is a named file, a handing-out of your own name: your details are inside it.
4. Updates, and what a new edition means
Sonsei grows mainly by growing its corpus — the researched body of mixing knowledge the advice is drawn from. So the licence records an edition, and that is the line between a free update and a paid one:
- Every release of the edition you bought is free, forever. Fixes, improvements and new corpus material that ship within your edition cost nothing, for as long as we ship them. We do not promise a rate of releases, and no update is ever required for what you already have to keep working.
- A new edition is a new purchase — offered to existing owners at an upgrade price ($29 at the time of writing). An edition is not a marketing milestone: it is declared when the corpus takes a step change large enough that we would rather be told we charged fairly than accused of drip-feeding.
- A new edition never disables what you own. Your build keeps running with your licence, indefinitely. If you install a newer-edition build while holding an older licence, that build tells you it needs the upgrade and points you at it — and your existing install is untouched, still working, still licensed.
5. What you may not do
- Share, publish, sell, rent, lend or sub-licence your licence file, or your copy of the plug-in.
- Use one licence for more than one person’s work (§1).
- Remove or alter copyright notices, or present Sonsei’s advice as your own product to third parties (using it on work you deliver to clients is exactly what it is for — reselling the counsel itself as a service is not).
- Work around the trial period or the licence check.
The reverse-engineering carve-out is real, not decorative. We ask you not to decompile or reverse-engineer Sonsei, but that request never overrides the rights EU law gives you anyway: you keep every right under articles 5 and 6 of Directive 2009/24/EC to observe, study and test how it works, to correct errors, and to obtain the information needed for interoperability. Nothing in this agreement limits those rights, and any clause here that appeared to would be void.
The licence is personal and not transferable — we have no mechanism to move a licence between people, and a resold named file still carries the original buyer’s name. A marketplace handing you a bearer file against your redemption code (§3) is not a transfer: that is the delivery of the licence you bought, and from the moment you redeem the code the licence is yours and just as personal as a named one. If you have a genuine reason to transfer one (a studio changing hands, say), write to legal@sonseiaudio.com and we will look at it rather than hide behind this clause.
6. Your music stays yours
We claim nothing in what you make. Your audio, your sessions and every mix you release are yours entirely — Sonsei takes no rights in them, and there is nothing to credit and no royalty to pay. The advice it gives you is yours to use, ignore or argue with.
And your audio does not travel: the analysis runs inside the plug-in on your own machine. Sonsei does not upload your audio, your sessions or your usage anywhere. That is not a privacy promise bolted on afterwards — the product has no server to send anything to.
Sonsei advises; it does not decide. It never changes your audio and never moves a control on another plug-in. Every judgement about a mix remains yours, and the counsel is exactly that — informed, sourced counsel about a craft where experienced engineers openly disagree, not a guarantee of a result.
7. Our rights, and other people’s names
Sonsei, its corpus, its interface and its design remain the property of Future Dynamic. You are buying a licence to use it, not the software itself.
Sonsei names real studio hardware and real plug-ins — a compressor topology, a gold-standard reference unit, the equivalent in your own rack. Those names are the property of their owners and are used only to identify the equipment being talked about, which is how engineers talk about it. It does not mean Future Dynamic is affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or partnered with any of those manufacturers, and Sonseicontains no code, no models and no audio from them.
8. Third-party components
Sonsei is built with third-party software used under its own licence — the JUCE framework, the TweetNaCl cryptographic library, and the typefaces used in the interface. The full notices ship with the product; ask legal@sonseiaudio.com for a copy at any time. Those licences govern those components, not this agreement.
9. What we promise, and what we don’t
We promise the plug-in matches what we described and works as an ordinary buyer would expect on a supported system (macOS 11.0 or later, in a host that supports one of the formats above). If it does not, that is our problem to fix — and your statutory rights as a consumer, including the conformity rights Dutch and EU law give you on digital content, apply in full whatever this document says.
Beyond that we do not warrant that Sonsei will suit a particular purpose, work with every host or system, or that following its advice will produce any particular result: mixing is a craft, not an arithmetic. Except where the law does not allow it to be limited — and it never limits liability for death or personal injury, for intent, or for gross negligence — our total liability for any claim under this agreement is limited to what you paid for the licence. We are not liable for lost projects, lost sessions or lost income; keep backups, as you would with any software in a studio.
10. Ending this licence
Your licence ends only if you break §5 seriously and do not put it right after we have asked you to in writing. There is no remote kill switch: we cannot and do not disable an installed copy, so this clause is about what you are permitted to do, not about something we can do to you. You can stop using Sonsei whenever you like — deactivating in the About panel removes the licence file from that machine and nothing else.
11. Changes, law and contact
We may update this agreement for new versions of the product. The version that binds your purchase is the one in force on the day you ordered — shown at the top of this page and recorded in your order confirmation. A change never applies retroactively to a licence you already hold.
This agreement is governed by the law of The Netherlands. If you bought as a consumer somewhere else in the EU, you keep the protection of the mandatory rules of your own country of residence — that choice of law cannot take those away from you. Disputes go to the competent Dutch courts, without prejudice to your right to bring one where you live.
Questions about this agreement: legal@sonseiaudio.com. Something not working: support@sonseiaudio.com.
Licence agreement (EULA) · Terms of sale · Refunds & right of withdrawal · Privacy