LEGAL · IN THE RHYTHM
In The Rhythm Terms of Service
Version 1.0
Last updated: 30 August 2026
Effective from: 1 September 2026
Contents
- Who you are agreeing with
- The service, and what it costs
- Accounts and age rules
- Musicians and teachers connecting
- Your content
- Behaviour
- Reporting, and protection from illegal content
- Blocking
- How children are protected
- Complaints
- Privacy
- Availability, changes, and the absence of backups
- Ending an account
- Responsibility and its limits
- If part of these terms fails
- Governing law
- Changes to these terms
- Contact
1. Who you are agreeing with
These terms are an agreement between you and Garden Recording Orchestra Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales with company number 16360681, whose registered office is at 44 Conduit Street, Gloucester, England, GL1 4TU. In these terms, "we" and "us" mean Garden Recording Orchestra Ltd. We run In The Rhythm.
You can email us at support@intherhythm.org.
2. The service, and what it costs
In The Rhythm is a music practice tracking app for musicians and teachers, available in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. It is free. There are no payments, subscriptions, or in-app purchases anywhere in it, and no advertising.
Your use of the iOS app is also subject to Apple's standard Licensed Application End User License Agreement. Your use of the Android app is also subject to the Google Play Terms of Service. Apple and Google are not parties to these Terms and have no responsibility for the Service or for any claim relating to it.
3. Accounts and age rules
One account per person, protected by an email address and a password. Keep them private: whoever holds them holds the account. Your email address must be confirmed before the account works, and deleting the account requires the password again.
You must answer the age question truthfully. The app asks only your birth month and year and keeps neither; what it keeps instead, and what that implies, is explained in the Privacy Policy, section 3.1.
If you are aged 13 to 17, a parent or guardian must read these Terms and the Privacy Policy and agree that you may use In The Rhythm. At signup you confirm that this has happened by ticking a box, and the app will not create the account without it. We take that confirmation at face value: we do not contact your parent or guardian, we do not ask them for anything, and we keep no separate record of the confirmation. If a parent or guardian wants the account closed, you can delete it yourself from Settings at any time, or either of you can email us.
The rules by age: under 13 cannot create an account at all, and the refusal is enforced in the database as well as on the device. From 13 to 17, musician accounts only, with the confirmation above. From 18, musician or teacher accounts; the database refuses a teacher account with any younger age band. When a stored birthday boundary passes, the account's age band changes automatically and silently.
Your age band and your role cannot be changed inside the app after signup, by you or by anyone using the app. If either is genuinely wrong, email us.
4. Musicians and teachers connecting
A connection always starts with the musician: they generate a 6-character code that lasts 24 hours and works once, and the teacher enters it. Once connected, the teacher can read every practice session the musician submits, in full, including notes and reflections, plus the focus line. The app says this on the code screen at the moment of sharing, and the Privacy Policy, section 7, sets out the exact scope. Drafts are never visible to anyone but their author.
Either side can end a connection at any time, and ending it cuts off all live access immediately. Reconnecting needs a fresh code, which only the musician can generate, so a teacher who removes a musician cannot undo that alone. A musician can also block a teacher; section 8 explains what that does.
Teachers can respond to a practice session only with one of 25 fixed supportive phrases. Free text is impossible there at the database level. There is no direct messaging anywhere in the app.
A connected teacher writes free text a musician reads in two places: the weekly focus line, up to 200 characters, and the name they set on their own profile. The focus line is checked against a word list, every version is kept in a history log, and the musician can report it from the focus card itself. The name is checked for shape only, as the Privacy Policy, section 14, describes, and the musician can report or block a teacher from the list it appears on. A musician can always overwrite the focus line, and can disconnect or block the teacher at any time. The database blocks a teacher from writing a focus line for an under-13 account.
5. Your content
What you write stays yours. By saving it, you allow us to store it and show it where the app is designed to show it: to you, and, for submitted sessions and the focus line, to your connected teachers. We do not use your content for anything else; analytics never includes it.
Two things outlive their author, so you should know about them before writing. A teacher's preset comment stays on the musician's session, with the teacher's name detached, if the teacher later deletes their account. And a report keeps a copy of the reported content, on the timers the Privacy Policy, sections 3.7 and 10, describe.
6. Behaviour
Use your real age. Use only your own account, and do not try to read data the app does not show you: access rules are enforced inside the database, and probing or attempting to bypass them is a breach of these terms. Do not harass, threaten, or demean anyone through any field another person will read, including practice notes a connected teacher reads, a display name, or the focus line. Do not use the app to collect information about children. Usernames and focus lines are filtered for offensive words, and display names are checked for shape; attempting to defeat those checks is a breach of these terms.
If someone breaks these rules toward you, use report or block (sections 7 and 8) rather than answering in kind inside the app.
7. Reporting, and protection from illegal content
Content written by one user can be encountered by another in a small number of places: submitted practice reflections read by a connected teacher, the focus line, teacher comments, usernames, and display names. This section describes how anything harmful or illegal in those places is reported and handled. The protections are structural first: there is no feed, no search, no public content, and no messaging, so nothing a user writes can reach anyone beyond a connection the musician created; access rules are enforced inside the database rather than only in the app; and we can close any account that breaks these terms or puts another user at risk.
Musicians can report a connected teacher, a specific comment, or a teacher-written focus line, from the content or profile itself. Teachers can report a connected musician. A reason is pre-selected so a report takes three taps, written details are optional, and reports about a specific comment or focus line carry a copy of that content so it is preserved even if later edited.
The app tells a reporter: "A real person will read this. You don't need to do anything else." These terms describe exactly what the system behind that promise guarantees, so the promise and the machinery can be compared honestly.
What is guaranteed: the report is saved to our database first, before anything else happens, so it cannot be lost afterward. An alert email telling us a report exists is then generated to our support mailbox; it carries no content from the report, which we read in the database. If sending fails, the send is retried automatically on a five-minute cycle with backoff, and repeated failure raises a separate failure alert of its own. What is not guaranteed by the system: the reading. That alert email is the only way a person learns a report exists; there is no review screen inside the app, and nothing in the system records whether a report was read. Whether and when a person reads the mailbox is an operational commitment, not a mechanical one, and our published aim is a response to safety reports usually within 3 working days. A report is deleted 12 months after it was filed whether or not it was ever read.
You are never told the outcome of a report, and nobody is told that a report was filed about them. There is no in-app way to view or withdraw a report you filed; email us to withdraw one. Alongside reporting, a musician can disconnect or block a teacher at any moment without waiting for us, which ends the teacher's access immediately.
If a child is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. The report system is not an emergency service.
8. Blocking
A musician can block a teacher at any time. Blocking ends the connection and makes reconnection impossible: any code the blocked teacher enters, including a brand new one, behaves exactly like an invalid code, and the teacher is never told a block exists. That silence is deliberate, because telling an adult that a specific child blocked them creates a real-world risk the app cannot manage. Blocking is reversible by the musician alone, in Settings; unblocking does not reconnect anyone, since a fresh code would still be needed.
9. How children are protected
Everyone on the service is 13 or over: the age floor is enforced by the age gate on the device and again by a database trigger on the server, so it holds even if the app is bypassed. Signup for anyone aged 13 to 17 is gated on the parental confirmation described in section 3.
There is no public side to the service. No feed, no search for other users, no public profiles, no content recommendation, and no direct messaging. A teacher can only ever be connected to a musician through a code the musician generated, which expires in 24 hours and works once.
What a connected teacher can see is exactly what the musician submits, plus the focus line, and what a teacher can write is one comment per session from 25 fixed phrases, the single 200-character focus line described in section 4, which is filtered, versioned, and reportable in place, and their own display name, which is checked for shape rather than for wording. Notification wording is fixed on the server, and the sending service refuses any request that tries to supply its own wording, so no notification can ever carry custom text.
Analytics is off by default, the app never nudges anyone to switch it on, and there is no advertising and no profiling for recommendations. A musician can block a teacher at any time, and the blocked teacher is never told.
10. Complaints
A complaint is different from a report. Reports (section 7) are about content or conduct on the service. A complaint is your objection to something we did: an account closed, content removed, a report you feel was mishandled, or a claim that we are not meeting our duties under these terms or the law.
To complain, email support@intherhythm.org with "Complaint" in the subject line, telling us what happened and what outcome you want. We will acknowledge your complaint within 5 working days, and give you our decision, with reasons, within one calendar month. If we need longer, we will tell you why and when to expect the decision.
Using this procedure never limits your right to complain to a regulator (Privacy Policy, section 13) or to go to court.
11. Privacy
The Privacy Policy is part of these terms. It explains what is collected, who processes it, how long each record is kept, and how deletion works. Where these terms and the Privacy Policy describe the same behaviour, the Privacy Policy's description governs.
12. Availability, changes, and the absence of backups
The app is provided free and as it is. We do not promise that it will always be available, uninterrupted, or free of errors, and we may change, suspend, or discontinue features or the app itself. There are no backups of the service's data: nothing lost or deleted can be restored, by you or by us. Do not treat the app as the only copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.
13. Ending an account
You can delete your account at any time from Settings. Deletion is immediate and permanent, and the Privacy Policy, sections 10 and 11, list exactly what little survives it and for how long.
We can close an account that breaks these terms or that puts another user, especially a child, at risk. If we close your account and you disagree, use the complaints procedure in section 10.
14. Responsibility and its limits
Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for breach of your statutory rights as a consumer that cannot lawfully be limited, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded. Nothing in these terms takes away rights that the law where you live gives you and does not allow to be given up.
Subject to the above, the Service is provided free of charge and on an "as is" basis. We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of data, or any indirect or consequential loss. Our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or in connection with these Terms and your use of the Service is limited in aggregate to £100.
15. If part of these terms fails
If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable where you live, that part is narrowed or removed as far as needed, and the rest of these terms stays in force.
16. Governing law
These Terms and any dispute arising out of or in connection with them are governed by the law of England and Wales. You and we agree that the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, except that if you are a consumer resident outside England and Wales you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protection provisions of the law of the country where you live, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of that country.
17. Changes to these terms
We may change these Terms. If we make a material change we will notify you by email to the address associated with your account before the change takes effect, and we will update the effective date above. If you do not agree to the change, you may stop using the Service and delete your account. Continuing to use the Service after the change takes effect means you accept the revised Terms.
We may transfer these Terms and our rights and obligations under them to another company as part of a sale, merger, or reorganisation of the Service. We will tell you before that happens. You may not transfer your account or your rights under these Terms to anyone else.
18. Contact
Email support@intherhythm.org, or write to Garden Recording Orchestra Ltd, 44 Conduit Street, Gloucester, England, GL1 4TU. We aim to respond to safety reports usually within 3 working days, to general support within 5 working days, and to data rights requests within one calendar month.