AirlinerAirliner privacy
Airliner is a radio player. It is designed to need as little from you as possible.
What stays on your Mac
Favorites, star ratings, local play counts and last-played dates, Smart Folder rules, your last 100 played stations, folders and manual stations are saved in a single file at ~/Library/Application Support/Airliner/library.json. Volume and appearance are saved in preferences. Nothing is synced to an account. Cached discovery results and station artwork are kept in local caches and capped in size.
What Airliner connects to
- Radio Browser (radio-browser.info), a community station directory, to search for stations. Requests identify the app with a descriptive User-Agent. After a station actually starts playing, Airliner reports a listen click to the directory.
- Broadcaster servers, directly, for audio streams, station logos and song metadata. Each broadcaster has its own policies.
- Station metadata, only if you opt in. Song previews are off by default. When enabled in Settings, Airliner makes short, throttled HTTPS metadata requests (one at a time, at most six starts per minute) to stations visible in the list. These use extra data and may briefly count as a listener at the broadcaster.
- GitHub releases, through the Sparkle updater, to check for and download signed updates. You can turn this off in Settings.
What Airliner does not do
No account or login, no analytics or telemetry, no advertising identifiers, no location permission, and no recording or saving of streams.
Audio meter permission
On macOS 14.2 through 26, the animated spectrum uses a private Core Audio tap limited to Airliner's own process, so macOS may ask for System Audio Recording permission. The audio is analyzed locally to draw the bars, is never written to disk and is never transmitted. If you decline, playback continues and the meter stays idle.
Spotify button
Find on Spotify opens a Spotify search for the current artist and title. Airliner does not connect to or access your Spotify account.