Ridgeline runs in your web browser, or in the Mac app. The sound, the wavetables, your recordings and your presets are all made and kept on your own device. None of them is sent anywhere. This page lists what does leave your device, and why.

What stays on your device

• Turning terrain into sound. Ridgeline downloads elevation tiles (see below), then reads the heights, builds the wavetable and plays it, all inside your browser. The synth runs in your browser’s own audio engine. No sound is streamed to or from a server.
• Recordings and wavetable exports are built in your browser and saved straight to your computer as files. They’re never uploaded.
• Presets and settings (your saved presets, the author name you give them, theme, page layout, pinned panels, MIDI choices and mappings, master volume) are kept in your browser’s storage on this device. There are no accounts and no copy on a server. Clearing your browser’s data for this site deletes them, so export presets you want to keep.
• Share links carry the whole preset after the # in the address. Browsers don’t send that part to the server when a link is opened, and Ridgeline removes it before sending usage statistics.
• MIDI notes and controllers are handled in your browser. The names of your MIDI devices stay on this device and aren’t sent anywhere.
• Listing audio outputs. Chrome only shows the names of your audio outputs (such as BlackHole) once you allow microphone access. Ridgeline asks only when you press “List output devices”, turns the microphone off again straight away, and never records or listens to it.
• The Mac app works the same way. Its Ableton Link connection shares tempo and beat with other Link apps on your computer or local network, not over the internet. Its virtual MIDI port, “Ridgeline port”, stays on your Mac.

Usage statistics

To see which features get used, Ridgeline counts visits and a few actions with Umami, a privacy-focused analytics tool, at umami.geom.one.

• Umami uses no cookies and stores nothing on your device to recognise you later.
• It doesn’t store your IP address. It uses it, together with your browser details, to tell one visit from another and to look up a rough location (country, region and city), then keeps only those results.
• With each visit it records the page address (without anything after #), the page you came from, your browser’s language, your screen size, and your browser, operating system and type of device.
• In the Mac app, the page address is replaced with a fixed one (mac.ridgeline.geom.one) and the page you came from is left out, so nothing about your files or folders is sent. Copies of the page opened from your own computer or another website aren’t counted.
• Blocking Umami, for example with a content blocker, doesn’t change how Ridgeline works.

The actions it counts, each marked as web page or Mac app:

• drawing a new transect, or adjusting one
• exporting a wavetable (with its bit depth and frame count), and saving a recording
• saving a preset (new or updated), loading one (built-in, yours or imported), sharing one as a link, downloading one as a file, and importing preset files (dropped or chosen)
• opening the preset browser, and opening a share link (whether it worked)
• once per visit: starting the sequencer, the first MIDI input (from the Mac app’s port or another device), and turning on Link
• clicking the mailing list sign-up

Never sent with these statistics: place names, what you search for, map positions or transects, preset names or settings, your author name, device names, recordings or any audio.

Outside services Ridgeline uses

These load straight from their providers, so like any website they see your IP address and what was asked for:

• Map tiles from Esri (topographic and satellite), or from OpenTopoMap if you choose it. They see which part of the map you look at.
• Elevation tiles: Mapzen Terrain Tiles, served by Amazon Web Services. They see which area you sample.
• Place search: when you search for a place name, the words you type go to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service. Coordinates you type (like 53.07, -4.08) are handled in your browser and go nowhere.
• Fonts from Google Fonts.
• Mailing list: only if you sign up. The sign-up page sends your email address to Geom’s mailing list at news.geom.one. Its spam check works out a puzzle in your browser and has no outside service behind it.

Questions

Get in touch through links.geom.one.

Last updated 8 November 2026