Terms and Conditions

• Application: ToneSphere
• Publisher: Neural Nexus Studios, an individual developer, Kolkata, West Bengal, India
• Document version: 1.3
• Effective date: 2 October 2026

1. About this document

These Terms and Conditions are the agreement between you and Neural Nexus Studios (in this document, “we”, “us” or “the Publisher”) covering the Application — the ToneSphere audio routing and mixing software, in any form in which we distribute it, together with its documentation.

This document governs your right to install and use the Application. Two related documents sit alongside it and are part of the same agreement:

• The Terms of Service describe what the Application provides and does not provide, how it is distributed, updated and supported, and the terms attaching to its optional network feature.
• The Privacy Policy describes how information is handled, which in practice means describing how little of it there is.

Where a subject is covered in one of those documents, it is cross-referenced here rather than repeated.

2. Acceptance

By installing, copying or using the Application you accept these Terms and Conditions. If you do not accept them, do not install or use the Application, and remove any copy you have already installed.

If you are using the Application in the course of employment or on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to accept these terms on its behalf.

3. Grant of use

The Application is released under the MIT Licence. The full text is in the LICENSE file at the root of the project repository, and it — not this section — is the operative grant. If anything in this document appears to narrow it, the MIT Licence wins.

What that means in practice, stated plainly because MIT is short enough to be easy to under-read:

• You may use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and sell copies of the Application, including for commercial purposes, and you do not need our permission to do so.
• The one condition is attribution. The copyright notice and the permission notice must be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Application. Removing them is the one thing that takes you outside the licence.
• No fee is charged today by us for the Application as we distribute it, through either the Microsoft Store or the project’s releases. See “Price and future versions” below.
• The licence covers the software, not the name. “ToneSphere” and “Neural Nexus Studios” are ours. MIT grants no trademark rights, so a modified or redistributed build must not be presented in a way that suggests it is the official Application or that we endorse, support or published it. Rename it, or say clearly what it is.
• Third-party components keep their own licences. See section 6.

Windows builds that include ASIO support are licensed to you under the GNU General Public License, version 3. ASIO support is a separate component, tonesphere_asio.dll, built from Steinberg’s ASIO SDK, which Steinberg licenses under GPLv3; its own source, in the native/asio directory of the repository, is GPLv3 (the licence text is in that directory’s LICENSE file). A distributed build that includes that component — the Windows executable published on the project’s releases page — is distributed under GPLv3 as a whole. The Microsoft Store package does not include that component. For a build that does:

• you have every right GPLv3 grants, including to run, study, modify and convey it;
• its Corresponding Source, including the Steinberg SDK sources it was built from, is published as a -source.zip archive in the project’s gpl-source release on GitHub, linked from the notes of the release that carries the executable;
• ToneSphere’s own source files remain available to you under the MIT Licence as well, as set out above; and
• nothing in these Terms and Conditions, or in the other two documents, restricts a right GPLv3 gives you. Where a provision would, it does not apply to that build. That includes the acceptable-use terms in section 4: they describe conduct the law or other people’s rights already govern, and are not conditions on your licence.

Builds without that component — the Microsoft Store package, and the Linux and macOS executables — are under the MIT Licence alone.

Price and future versions. The Application is free of charge today. We may in future offer paid versions, editions or features, through the Microsoft Store or through other channels, and may release future versions under licence terms different from those above. If we do:

• a copy you have already obtained keeps the licence it came with, which is not withdrawn, and continues to work as it did;
• the price, and the licence terms of a paid version, are shown to you before you pay, and nothing is charged for without your acting to buy it;
• a purchase through the Microsoft Store, including payment and refunds, is handled by Microsoft under its own terms (section 14), and a purchase through another channel under that channel’s terms as presented at the time.

4. Acceptable use

The MIT Licence in section 3 governs what you may do with the software itself, and this section does not take any of it back. What follows is about conduct the licence does not speak to — the law, other people’s audio, and other people’s trademarks.

You may not:

• remove, obscure or alter the copyright and permission notices. This is not an extra restriction we are adding; it is the MIT Licence’s one condition, restated here because it is the term most often overlooked;
• present a modified or redistributed build as the official Application, or in a way that implies our endorsement. MIT grants no rights in the “ToneSphere” or “Neural Nexus Studios” names;
• misrepresent the Application’s capabilities when describing or redistributing it. The project documents, deliberately and in detail, which of its features are proven, which are measured on which hardware, and which are unverified. Presenting an unverified capability as a working one — including the platform limitations listed in the Terms of Service — is a misuse of the Application’s documentation as well as a disservice to whoever believes it;
• use the Application to capture, monitor, route or transmit audio that you do not have the right to capture. The Application can capture a single application’s output, a whole output device, and audio arriving from a network peer. Whether a particular capture or recording is lawful depends on where you are and who else is party to the sound — recording calls, meetings, performances, broadcasts or other people generally requires their consent, notice, or a licence, and complying with the law that applies to you is your responsibility;
• use the Application to circumvent a technical measure protecting audio content, or to infringe anyone’s copyright, performance rights or privacy;
• use the Application for any unlawful purpose.

You are responsible for your use of the Application, and you agree to hold us harmless from claims arising out of your breach of this section — in particular claims relating to audio you captured, transmitted or published.

5. Third-party plugins

On Windows, the Application can host VST3 audio effect plugins that you already own, and load them onto the device inputs and outputs you choose. AU plugins are not supported, and instrument plugins are not offered. Those plugins are not ours:

• We do not supply, sell, bundle or endorse any third-party plugin. Your right to use a plugin comes from that plugin’s own licence, from its vendor, and having a valid licence for each plugin you load is your responsibility.
• A hosted plugin runs inside the Application’s process, in the real-time audio path. The Application stops calling a plugin that faults and tells you so, but a plugin that misbehaves can still produce unexpected output, add latency, degrade performance, or crash the Application. We are not responsible for a plugin’s behaviour, its stability, its audio quality, or anything it does on your system.
• What a plugin transmits, stores or checks over the network is governed by its vendor’s own terms. See section 5 of the Privacy Policy.

6. Third-party components

The Application is built on third-party software, including PortAudio (through sounddevice), Qt (through PySide6), NumPy, FastAPI, Steinberg’s VST3 SDK (MIT), Xiph’s libopus (BSD 3-clause) and, in Windows builds from GitHub, Steinberg’s ASIO SDK (GPLv3; see section 3). The project’s docs/DEPENDENCIES.md lists them with their licences. Each of those components is governed by its own licence, and those licences continue to apply to those components. Nothing in this agreement restricts a right you have in a third-party component under its own licence.

“ASIO” and “VST” are trademarks of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH. Their use here describes compatibility and implies no endorsement.

7. Audio levels, hearing and equipment

The Application processes and monitors audio in real time, at gain settings you control. A routing mistake, a feedback loop, a mis-set gain or a misbehaving plugin can produce sudden loud output.

The Application places a limiter on each output, and that limiter exists so that a routing mistake sounds like a compressed mix rather than a burst of digital noise. It is a mix-safety measure. It is not a hearing-protection device and it is not an equipment protection device, and it should not be relied on as either. Set levels carefully, start low, and protect your ears, your monitors and your headphones yourself.

8. No warranty

The Application is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or uninterrupted or error-free operation. To the extent that applicable law does not permit the exclusion of a particular warranty, that warranty is limited to the minimum period and extent the law requires.

In particular, and consistent with how this project documents itself:

• Performance figures are measurements, not promises. Latency, dropout and DSP-load figures in the project’s documentation were measured on specific hardware with a specific driver, buffer size and backend, and are published together with those conditions. Your machine, drivers, devices and plugins will produce different numbers. Nothing in the documentation is a warranty of a particular latency or of glitch-free audio.
• Features documented as unverified are unverified. The Terms of Service list the platform features that are proven, and the ones — the macOS virtual audio device in day-to-day use, in particular — that are proven only in continuous integration and not in real-world use. They are provided on exactly those terms.
• The Application is not certified for safety-critical, life-safety, broadcast-compliance or other high-reliability use, and must not be relied upon where a failure of audio would cause injury, significant loss, or a breach of a regulatory obligation.

9. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, we will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for any loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, data, recordings, performances, sessions or business opportunity, arising out of or in connection with the Application or its use, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, and whether or not we were advised of the possibility of such loss.

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with the Application and this agreement is limited to the greater of the amount you actually paid for the Application in the twelve months before the claim — which, for a copy obtained free of charge, is zero — or INR 1,000.

Nothing in this agreement excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.

10. Voluntary support

Sponsorships and donations made through GitHub Sponsors, Patreon, Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee are voluntary contributions to the project’s continued development. They are not a purchase of the Application, and they do not grant additional rights, entitlements, warranties or service commitments. See the Terms of Service for how that is handled.

11. Term and termination

This agreement applies for as long as you use the Application.

Your MIT Licence rights are not revocable by us, and nothing here ends them. The MIT Licence is a grant, not a subscription: it continues for as long as you meet its one condition, and this agreement cannot and does not take it away. What can lapse for breach of this agreement is anything granted beyond MIT — permission to use our names, and any support or goodwill we extend voluntarily under section 10.

You may stop using the Application at any time by uninstalling it. Sections 8, 9 and 13 survive.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms and Conditions. Every version carries a version number and an effective date at the top of the document, and the current version is published at the address where you are reading it. If you continue to use the Application after an updated version takes effect, you accept the updated version. If you do not accept it, stop using the Application and uninstall it. Superseded versions remain in the project repository’s history.

13. Governing law and jurisdiction

This agreement, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with it or with the Application, is governed by the laws of India, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

The courts at Kolkata, West Bengal, India have exclusive jurisdiction over any such dispute or claim, and you and we submit to that jurisdiction. Nothing in this section removes a right you may have under the consumer-protection law of your own country of residence to bring proceedings there, where that law gives you that right and it cannot be excluded by agreement.

14. General

• Severability. If any provision of this agreement is held unenforceable, it is to be read down to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable, or severed if that is not possible, and the remaining provisions continue in force.
• No waiver. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign or transfer this agreement. We may assign it as part of a transfer of the project.
• Entire agreement. This document, together with the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy, is the entire agreement between you and us about the Application, and replaces any earlier understanding about it.
• Additional terms of a distribution channel. Where you obtained the Application from a store — the Microsoft Store, in particular — that store’s own terms also apply to the acquisition. See the Terms of Service.

15. Contact

Questions, notices and permission requests relating to this agreement should be raised as an issue in the project repository:

https://github.com/AvishakeAdhikary/tone-sphere/issues

That is the project’s contact channel. Issues are public, so do not include anything confidential in one.