Legal
Licence, privacy and refunds
In plain language, and short enough to read. Last updated 16 September 2026.
1. Licence agreement
This agreement is between you and CNTRLLD (“we”, “us”). By installing or using SPECTRA you agree to it. If you don’t, don’t install it — and if you already bought it, write to us.
What you get
A personal, non-exclusive licence to use SPECTRA for as long as you like, for any purpose, including commercial work. There are no royalties and nothing to report: music you make with it is yours.
The licence is issued to one person, by name and e-mail address. You may install and use it on up to three computers that you use yourself — for example a studio machine, a laptop and a spare. It is not a licence for a household, a team or a studio with several engineers; every user needs their own.
Trial
Without a licence SPECTRA runs for 30 days with nothing held back: no noise bursts, no disabled controls. After that it stops passing audio until you activate it. Your sessions and settings stay as they are.
Updates
Updates within the same major version are free: a licence for version 1 covers every 1.x release. A future version 2 would be a new product with its own price. If that day comes, people who already bought from us are looked after — we would rather reward the people who were there early than charge them twice.
Your licence text
Your licence is a short piece of text carrying your name and e-mail address. Treat it like a key: don’t post it, share it or publish it. If it turns up in public we may withdraw it, and you would need a new one.
You may not sell, rent, lend or transfer your licence. If your situation genuinely changes — you sell your studio, or your business is taken over — write to us and we will re-issue it in another name once, free of charge.
What you may not do
- Copy, distribute or resell SPECTRA itself, or make it available to others.
- Take apart, decompile or modify the software, except where the law explicitly allows it (in the EU, for interoperability; nothing here takes away rights the law gives you).
- Remove or change any notices, names or licence checks.
Ownership
SPECTRA stays ours. You buy the right to use it, not the software itself. The name CNTRLLD and the name SPECTRA are ours too.
Guarantee and liability
We build this carefully and test it heavily, but no software is perfect and we cannot promise it is faultless or that it suits every purpose. SPECTRA is provided as it is.
Where the law allows us to limit our liability, our total liability is limited to what you paid for the licence, and we are not liable for indirect damage such as lost work, lost recordings or lost income. Nothing here limits our liability for intent or gross negligence, and nothing here affects your statutory rights as a consumer.
Keep backups of your work. That is good practice with any plug-in, not only ours.
If you break the agreement
If you seriously break these terms — sharing your licence publicly, or cracking the software — the licence ends and you must stop using SPECTRA. We will always contact you first; a mistake is not the same thing as abuse.
Law
Dutch law applies, and disputes go to the court in Zeeland-West-Brabant, the Netherlands. If you are a consumer in another EU country, the mandatory consumer protections of your own country still apply to you.
Other people’s work in SPECTRA
SPECTRA is built with the JUCE framework, under a commercial JUCE licence. The interface uses the Barlow and Barlow Semi Condensed typefaces, released under the SIL Open Font License. VST is a registered trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH; Audio Units is a trademark of Apple Inc.
2. Privacy
Short version: we keep your name and e-mail address so that your licence exists and you can find it again. We don’t track you, we don’t use cookies, we don’t sell anything to anyone.
Who is responsible
CNTRLLD, Grote Dries 29, 4854 RT Bavel, the Netherlands, is the controller of your data. Questions or requests: support@cntrlld.com.
What we keep, and why
| Your name and e-mail address | To put your name on your licence and to send it to you. Without these there is no licence.Basis: performing our agreement with you. |
|---|---|
| Your order number and the licence we issued | So we can find your licence again, and so you can download it from your account.Basis: performing our agreement with you. |
| A record of the e-mails we sent you | So we can tell whether your licence actually went out when you say it never arrived.Basis: our legitimate interest in being able to help you. |
| Sign-in links for your account | Stored as a one-way code, valid once, for 20 minutes.Basis: performing our agreement with you. |
We never see your payment details. The shop handles the payment and is the seller of record; we only receive “this person bought SPECTRA”, with a name and an e-mail address.
How long
We keep your customer record while your licence is in use. If an account sits unused for one year — no downloads, no sign-ins, no support — we delete the personal data in it. Records of e-mails we sent are deleted after a year. Invoices are kept by the shop for as long as tax law requires, which in the Netherlands is seven years.
Who else processes it
- Cloudflare — hosting of this website, the database and the account pages.
- Moonbase — the shop: payment, VAT and invoicing.
- Resend — sending your licence and sign-in e-mails.
- Google Workspace — our support mailbox.
Some of these are based outside the European Union. Where that is the case, the transfer rests on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses or an adequacy decision.
This website
No cookies, no advertising trackers, no third-party fonts: everything the site loads comes from this domain, with one exception named below. We see only the anonymous counts our host keeps of the requests it serves — how often a page was opened, from which country — which identify nobody, and that is why you are not being asked to accept anything.
Your account uses one cookie, and only after you sign in: it remembers that it is you, and nothing else.
The exception is the checkout. On the pages where SPECTRA can be bought, the page loads the shop from Moonbase (assets.moonbase.sh), so that paying happens here instead of on a strange website. That shop keeps your basket in your own browser, and what you type at checkout — your name, your e-mail address, your payment details — goes to Moonbase, who are the seller. We never see your card. Buy nothing and it does nothing with you.
The plug-in
SPECTRA checks your licence on your own computer. It does not need an internet connection and it does not send us your audio, your projects or your settings — not ever.
The first time you open SPECTRA it asks whether you would like to hear about updates. Only if you say yes does it check, once a day, whether a newer version exists — and that request carries the version you are running and your operating system, nothing else: no name, no e-mail address, no licence. Say no, or ignore the question, and SPECTRA never contacts us at all. You can change your mind either way in the plug-in.
Your rights
You can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, or to delete it. Write to support@cntrlld.com and we will sort it out, normally within a few days and always within a month. Deleting your data also removes your ability to re-download your licence, so keep a copy first.
If you think we handle your data badly, you may complain to the Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.
E-mail about updates
When you buy SPECTRA we may send you occasional e-mail about updates to it and about our other audio products — never more than a few times a year, and never about anything but our own work. Every message has an unsubscribe link, and one click is enough. You can also tell us at the time of purchase that you would rather not.
3. Refunds
Try it first. SPECTRA runs for 30 days with nothing held back, on your own music, in your own DAW. That is the honest way to find out whether it is for you, and it is why we do not hand out refunds simply because someone changed their mind after buying.
The legal part
As a consumer in the EU you normally have 14 days to withdraw from an online purchase. For digital products that are delivered immediately, that right ends as soon as delivery starts — and at checkout you are asked to agree to immediate delivery and to acknowledge that. Your licence is sent within seconds, so from that moment the 14-day withdrawal right no longer applies.
When we do refund
- A technical problem we cannot solve. If SPECTRA does not work on your system and we cannot fix it within a reasonable time, you get your money back. Write to us within 14 days of buying, tell us your operating system and DAW, and we will first try to help; if we can’t, we refund.
- A double purchase, or a purchase you did not make. Refunded, of course.
- Anything genuinely unreasonable. If something happened that these rules did not foresee, write to us. We would rather be fair than right.
How
E-mail support@cntrlld.com with your order number. Payments and refunds are handled by our shop, so the money goes back the way it came, usually within five to ten working days. After a refund, the licence is withdrawn and may no longer be used.
4. Terms of sale
- Who sells. Purchases run through Moonbase, which acts as the seller of record and handles payment, VAT and invoicing. Their terms apply to the transaction; this page and the licence agreement above apply to the use of the software.
- What you are buying today. SPECTRA is on sale while version 1 is still being finished, which is why the price is lower now. You get the build that is available at the time of purchase and every update up to and including version 1, at no extra cost. A beta is a working plug-in, not a finished one: there may be rough edges, and we would like to hear about them.
- Prices. Shown including VAT for consumers. The final amount, in your own currency, is shown at checkout.
- Delivery. By e-mail, within a few seconds of payment, to the address you gave at checkout. Nothing is shipped.
- Not arrived? Check your spam folder, then sign in at your account, where your licence is always waiting. Still nothing: write to support and we will send it again.
- Support. By e-mail, in English or Dutch. We answer as quickly as we can, usually within a couple of working days.
- Complaints. Tell us first — most things are solved in one e-mail. If we cannot work it out together, Dutch law applies and the court in Zeeland-West-Brabant has jurisdiction.
5. Company details
| Name | CNTRLLD |
|---|---|
| Address | Grote Dries 29 4854 RT Bavel The Netherlands |
| support@cntrlld.com | |
| Chamber of Commerce (KvK) | 54530334 |
| VAT identification number | NL002294659B24 |