The questions people actually ask.

No. You can sign up, search, rate, tag, build playlists, follow people and use everything else without connecting anything. Your ratings and tags are ours and yours; no service is involved in them.

Connecting a service adds two things: playback from inside notch.fm, and pulling across the library you already have. Everything else works either way.

Apple Music, Spotify and TIDAL, one at a time. The front page says which are ready today, and if one is not you can leave your address and we will tell you the day it is.

TIDAL is not ready yet. It is being built, there is no date, and the card on the front page says so rather than implying otherwise.

One at a time is not a limitation we chose. Spotify's developer rules say their content must not be shown alongside a competing service, so an app that mixed both in one view would be breaking them. Switching is fine.

No. A rating belongs to the recording, not to the service you happened to be using when you made it. Switching brings them with you.

Because the two companies have different rules, and we would rather say so than pretend it is a missing feature.

Apple lets an app charge for itself and its own features while offering playback. Spotify does not allow an app that controls playback to be sold at all, in any tier. So on a paid notch.fm, a Spotify connection shows you what to play and hands it to Spotify, rather than driving it for you.

For rating, tagging, searching and building playlists, no. A free Spotify account is enough to connect and use almost everything.

Playback control is the exception, and that is Spotify's rule rather than ours: their API only allows an app to start, pause or skip a track for Premium accounts. On a free account those buttons will tell you so instead of failing quietly.

Only when you ask it to, and you can switch that off entirely. Rating and tagging happen inside notch.fm and are invisible to the service. Liking a song or saving a playlist writes across, because that is the point of doing it, and removing a song from your notch.fm library un-likes it there too - which is why that action asks you to confirm a list first.

If you would rather it never touched your service at all, there is a switch for that in Settings under the connection: Keep my service's library in step. Turn it off and notch.fm stops writing anything across. Nothing already sent is taken back, and anything you do while it is off is still saved here.

Ratings

Fifty a day, and no ceiling on how many you end up with

Smart search and notchbot

150 requests a month, up to 15 an hour

Playlists

One playlist, up to 25 songs

Tags

Ten of your own categories per kind

Following

As many people as you like

Comments

Read and post

Superlike

One a day, same as Premium

Achievements

Everything except a Premium-only set

Premium lifts all of those. See pricing.

Nothing is deleted. Everything you rated stays visible, searchable and exportable, however far over the free limit you are. You can still change a rating you already made, because that is your own work.

What stops is adding: while you hold more than 150 rated songs you cannot rate a new one until you resubscribe, or choose to trim your library back under the limit. That choice is offered and never forced, and it uses the same confirm-before-removing screen as everything else that touches your library.

Each one maps to a feature you can point at. Reading your library is what there is to rate. Reading what is playing is the Now Playing screen. Playback control is the transport buttons. Creating playlists is saving one. Reading your top artists is what the charts and the concerts watchlist are built from.

notch.fm cannot see your password, and your Spotify tokens never reach your browser. You can revoke access at any time from your Spotify account page, and doing so stops notch.fm reaching Spotify immediately.

One song a day, taken straight to ten and shown to the people who follow you. Everyone gets one, free or paid; the point is that it is scarce, so it means something when you spend it.

The day is a rolling twenty-four hours from the moment you use it, not a calendar day, so it comes back when you would expect rather than at some midnight in another timezone.

A library that can be asked questions. Once songs carry your own scores and tags, you can say what you want in words - something chill from my nines, late night, nothing I have heard this week - and get a queue built from your own judgement rather than from what an algorithm thinks people like you enjoy.

It also works on songs you have never rated: notch.fm fills gaps from the catalogue and from what the wider community has scored, and marks which is which so a guess never passes as your own verdict.

No. Tagging and rating both work one song at a time, and search falls back to your library, the catalogue and community scores for anything you have not reached yet. A few dozen ratings is enough for the queue builder to have something of yours to work with.

Only what you choose to share. A rating is private by default. What reaches other people is what you superlike, what you comment on and what your profile says it shares - and there is a setting deciding whether your scores count towards the global averages at all.

See privacy for exactly what is stored and what leaves.

It is a web app that installs to a home screen, so it behaves like an app on a phone without an app store in the way. It needs a connection: the ratings, the search and the playback all live on the other end of one. A native app is planned.

You can still rate it, tag it and keep it in your library - that is all ours. What you cannot do is play it, and notch.fm says which of the two it is rather than failing quietly.

Matching a song between services is harder than it sounds: the same recording carries different identifiers everywhere. notch.fm matches on the recording itself where it can, and falls back to looking the song up in the catalogue when an identifier is missing.

You choose one of three modes in settings. Public means anyone can see your profile and follow you. Private means people can see that your account exists but not the data behind it, and following requires your approval. Anonymous means you cannot be searched for or followed at all, and the app becomes a read-only feed: you can follow public accounts but not comment or post.

Yes, all of it, at any time, from settings. Your ratings, tags, comments and play history export in a machine-readable format. There is no export tier and no waiting period.

No. notch.fm is an independent app and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them. None has reviewed it and none is responsible for it.

You do not need an account at any of them to use notch.fm. If you connect one, playback happens entirely through that service, on your own account there, and this app never touches the audio.