Privacy
Nobody should need a law degree to work out what a website does with their visit, so this is written the way one person would explain it to another. MP3Download is a search tool for music: you type a name, it looks that name up in somebody else's catalogue, and it plays or saves whatever comes back. The list of things it needs from you is short, and everything on it is spelled out below.
If you read nothing else
- You never tell us who you are. There is no sign-up, no password, and nothing with your name on it.
- No audio is kept here. Tracks are put together inside your own browser as the bytes arrive.
- Visits are counted, not followed. For the headcount your address is scrambled first, and the plain web-server logs are described further down.
- A few outside services do handle part of a visit, because the site cannot work without them. Every one of them is named below, with the reason.
There is nothing to sign up for
Skipping accounts removes most of the usual privacy worries in one go. You will not find a registration form, a confirmation email, a password to forget, a saved library, a payment screen, or any way to upload something of your own.
That also answers a question people often ask next. Since no account exists, there is no file under your name to send you, correct or erase, because one was never created in the first place.
What your own browser holds on to
Two small things are kept in your browser's own storage while you use the site. Clearing site data from your browser settings removes both of them straight away.
Your light or dark choice
When you switch themes, the choice is written down in your browser so the next page opens the way you left it instead of flashing back to the wrong one. It records a colour scheme and nothing more.
A short-lived download pass
Once a download check has been solved, a temporary pass is held so you are not asked to prove yourself again a minute later. Unlike the theme setting, this one does travel back to the download service with your next request, because that is its entire job, and it stops working on its own after a while.
How visits get counted
Knowing roughly how many people turned up on a given day is genuinely useful. It shows when something has quietly broken and when the servers are running out of room. Doing that usually means writing down IP addresses, and keeping a list of those felt like the wrong trade.
So before anyone is counted, their address is mixed with a value that only the server holds and run through a one-way hash. The scrambled result is what gets saved. It stays consistent for the same visitor, which is all a headcount needs, and it is not readable as an address the way a stored IP would be. Nothing in that process keeps the address itself.
Separately, the web server answering these requests writes ordinary access logs, much as nearly every web server on the internet does, and those lines do contain real addresses. They are working records for fixing faults and spotting attacks rather than a source of statistics, and they are not joined up with the visitor counts described above.
Who else handles part of a visit
No site like this one runs entirely on its own, and saying otherwise would simply be untrue. Four outside services are involved, each doing one specific job. Two of them take part in an ordinary visit whether you do anything or not, a third only hears from you if you use the contact form, and the fourth is switched off today. That is why you will not find a promise here that no third party ever receives anything.
The music catalogue
Searches, artists, albums and the 30-second clips all come from an external music catalogue service. The words you type travel through our own service first, but cover art and preview audio are fetched by your browser straight from their servers, so a request from your connection lands there directly. Whatever they note down is governed by their policy, not by this page.
Delivery and security provider
These pages are served through a content delivery and security provider that sits in front of the server, hands out the files and absorbs traffic aimed at knocking the site over, so your connection passes through it on the way here. The same provider supplies the automated check that can appear before a download, which reads signals from your browser to tell a person apart from a script.
Contact form delivery
If you write to us from the contact page, the message is passed to an outside form-delivery service which forwards it to our inbox. It receives exactly what you filled in — your name, your email address, any subject line and the message itself — and nothing else about your visit. Skip the form and it receives nothing at all.
Google Analytics
Measurement is wired into the site but switched off as this is written: no measurement ID is configured, so no analytics script loads and nothing is sent anywhere. Please treat it as something that may be turned on later. If that happens, the service is Google Analytics 4, and it would receive ordinary page-view information such as which pages opened, a rough location, and your device and browser, on terms Google sets rather than us.
Downloads are built on your machine
This part surprises people often enough to be worth explaining properly. MP3Download keeps no shelf of audio files waiting to be handed out. When you ask for a track, scrambled bytes stream in through our proxy and arrive in your browser, where a background worker, a small piece of code running on your own device, unscrambles them and writes the title, artist and cover picture into the finished file. The file is assembled where you are and saved from there.
Being straight about the other half of that: the download service has to be told which track you picked, otherwise it cannot go and fetch it, so that request does pass through our side like any other. What it never holds is the result. No finished audio file is stored here, and the copy you keep exists only on your own device.
Why requests get limited
There is a cap on how many searches and downloads a single connection can make in a stretch of time, worked out from the address you are currently using. It exists so one impatient script cannot burn through the catalogue allowance that everyone is sharing. If a message ever asks you to wait a moment, that is all that has happened. The limiter is counting recent requests, not assembling a history of your visits.
Asking us about any of this
With no accounts in play there is rarely a specific record to look up, but if something written here does not match what you are seeing, or you would like a message you sent removed from our inbox, just say so and it will be dealt with. Write in and it reaches us directly.
Send a messageMP3Download is run by one person as a side project rather than by a company, and it has no tie of any kind to the platforms whose catalogue it searches. What you have just read describes how the site behaves, not legal advice. It gets rewritten whenever the site changes, the day analytics is switched on very much included.