License and Legal

The AGPL relicense and why it happened, third-party components, data source attribution, and affiliation.

Current license

Orchard is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later), from version 4.0.0 onward.

Full text: LICENSE.

The relicense

Releases up to and including 3.x were published under the MIT License. That grant is irrevocable, so those versions remain MIT. Everything from 4.0.0 onward is AGPL.

The reason is Rubber Band, the time-stretching library that makes beat-matched transitions possible. Rubber Band is GPL-2.0-or-later, and linking it into Orchard requires Orchard itself to be copyleft. MIT could not accommodate it.

AGPL rather than plain GPL was chosen so that code moves freely between Orchard desktop and Orchard Mobile, which is also AGPL. The native analysis front end is already shared source, and more of it is expected to be.

Worth knowing about what the relicense does and does not unlock: copyleft makes GPL libraries like Rubber Band usable, but it does nothing for model weights licensed non-commercially. CC BY-NC-SA weights, which is most of the published music-information-retrieval field including Essentia’s, still cannot be distributed inside an application regardless of the application’s license.

What AGPL means for you

Using Orchard. Run it however you like, on as many machines as you like.

Modifying Orchard. Modify it freely. If you distribute your modified version, the modifications must be released under the AGPL too.

Running a modified version as a network service. This is what distinguishes AGPL from GPL. If you run modified Orchard code as a service that users interact with over a network, those users must be able to obtain the source of your modified version.

Contributing. Contributions are accepted under the AGPL. See Contributing.

and I swear on everything I have come to love, if some Claude Fable 5 vibe coder forks this repo and ends up with more stars and more users than me, I am going to be normal about it. completely normal. (the license does permit this. the license permits a great many things I have feelings about.)

Third-party components

Native

Component	Purpose	License
Rubber Band	Time-stretching	GPL-2.0-or-later
node-addon-api	N-API bindings	MIT

Rubber Band is vendored at native/vendor/rubberband on desktop and android/app/src/main/cpp/vendor/rubberband on mobile.

Models

Both shipped models were chosen because their weights carry a permissive license.

Model	Purpose	License
Beat This! (Foscarin, Schlüter & Widmer, ISMIR 2024)	Beat and downbeat tracking	MIT, code and weights
open-unmix (Stöter & Liutkus, Inria/SigSep)	Vocal presence measurement	MIT, code and umxhq weights, confirmed on the weights’ Zenodo deposit
ONNX Runtime (Microsoft)	Inference	MIT

Only open-unmix’s vocals target ships. Meta’s htdemucs separates better but releases its weights under CC-BY-NC-4.0, which a distributed application cannot ship.

Application

Electron, Vue, Quasar, Vite, Socket.IO, youtubei.js, essentia.js, Zod, Vibrant, fflate, and the rest of the dependency tree carry their own licenses. See package.json and the lock file.

Data sources and attribution

BPM and musical-key metadata is provided by GetSongBPM. GetSongBPM’s API terms require a visible backlink, which the BPM worker’s root page carries.

Live-show discovery is powered by Ticketmaster.

Share-link resolution uses public lookup APIs from Apple Music and Deezer, and the official TIDAL API when credentials are configured.

Trademark and affiliation

Orchard is an unofficial client. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube, Google, Apple, Spotify, Last.fm, Discord, Ticketmaster, or any other service it interoperates with. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Service dependencies

Orchard depends on external services that can change without notice: YouTube Music sign-in, catalog access, playback, live-show discovery, sharing, scrobbling, updates, and support. Features can break when an upstream changes, and no warranty is offered against that.

Warranty

Orchard is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty, without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU Affero General Public License for details.