Last updated 30 August 2026
This agreement is between you and Lathe Software LLC and covers your use of the Lathe software. Installing or using Lathe means you accept it.
We grant you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use Lathe for the edition you hold, subject to this agreement.
Perpetual means perpetual. There is no subscription, no expiry date, and no version you have paid for that stops working later. If we disappear tomorrow, the copy on your Mac keeps running.
Those Mac counts are the terms of your licence, not a mechanism. Lathe does not count your machines, does not check in with us, and does not require activation. We are telling you what you have bought and trusting you to honour it. Moving Lathe to a new Mac means copying one file — there is nothing to deactivate, because nothing was ever activated.
Your licence is a small signed file. Lathe verifies it on your own machine, offline. It is yours to keep, back up and move. We recommend you save it somewhere you will find it again; if you lose it, write to support@lathe-app.com and we will send it to you.
Your licence carries the email address you bought with, and Lathe displays it. Please don’t publish or share your licence — it is issued to you, and sharing it puts your own name on somebody else’s Mac.
We reserve the right to withdraw a licence that we find has been distributed publicly. A withdrawn licence falls back to Lathe Rescue — which is a complete rescue tool, so nobody’s music is ever trapped by this. If yours is ever affected and you bought it yourself, write to support@lathe-app.com and we will make it right.
This agreement contains no prohibition on reverse engineering, and that is deliberate.
Lathe includes components licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Section 4 of the LGPL requires that you be permitted to reverse engineer for debugging modifications to those components, and to modify the software for your own use and reverse engineer to debug those modifications. A clause forbidding it would put us in breach of the licence of our own dependency.
You are therefore expressly permitted to decompile, disassemble and reverse engineer Lathe to the extent the LGPL requires, and to the extent applicable law permits regardless of contract.
Lathe does not supply, host, sell, stream or distribute any music. It works only on files you already have and hardware you already own. You are responsible for holding the rights to the music you use it on. We claim no rights in your files, your library, or anything Lathe produces from them.
Lathe includes and dynamically links the following third-party software. Their licences govern those components, and nothing in this agreement restricts rights you have under them.
The library that reads and writes the iPod database. Our build of libgpod is modified. It is linked dynamically, and it may be replaced with a compatible version of your own.
Written offer of source. Lathe Software LLC will provide, to any person who asks, the complete corresponding source code for our modified build of libgpod, together with the patches applied to the stock version and the scripts used to build it, under the terms of the LGPL v2.1. This offer is valid for at least three years from the date you received the software.
Write to support@lathe-app.com with the subject “LGPL source request”. We will send a download link at no charge, or physical media at no more than our cost of doing so.
The embedded runtime that hosts Lathe’s engine. Copyright © 2001–present Python Software Foundation.
Every third-party component, its licence, its copyright notice, and the written offer of source are set out on the open source notices page. Where a later version adds a component, its notice is added there and ships with that version.
Lathe is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Apple Inc. iPod, iTunes, Mac and macOS are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
Lathe is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.
We have tested Lathe on real hardware, and we care a great deal about not damaging anything of yours — a rescue never writes to your iPod, by design. But iPods are old devices with failing disks, and no software can promise that a twenty-year-old drive will survive being read. Keep backups of anything you cannot lose. That is good advice regardless of whose software you use.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Lathe Software LLC is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost data, lost profits, or lost music, arising from your use of or inability to use Lathe.
Our total liability is limited to the amount you paid for your licence.
Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions, in which case they apply to you only as far as the law allows. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.
This licence ends if you materially breach it — in practice, if you redistribute Lathe as your own or traffic in licence files. Lathe Rescue remains available to you regardless, because it is free to everyone.
This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Kansas, United States, without regard to its conflict of law rules. This does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer law in your own country of residence.
This agreement, together with the Terms of Service and Refund Policy, is the entire agreement between us about the software. If any part is found unenforceable, the rest stands.
Lathe Software LLC
Kansas, United States · Business Entity ID 10087878
support@lathe-app.com