Help / Licensing & trial
Using the app offline, and what reconnect means
Vesari Stylus does not need the internet to play music. An activated paid licence does check in with our server now and then, so this page sets out how often that happens, what happens when it cannot, and the one thing that holds throughout: your library keeps playing.
The short answer
A Pro or Lifetime licence re-checks with our licence server about once a week in the background. If those checks cannot get through for 30 days, premium features pause and a calm banner asks for a reconnect. One successful check switches them straight back on. Your library, your playback and your tags are untouched the whole time.
The weekly check, described plainly
It is an outbound connection, and we would rather say so than dress it up.
- It runs only once you have activated a licence key. On Free, during a trial, or before you activate, this check does not run at all.
- It happens roughly once a week. The app glances at the schedule a few times a day and only reaches out when a week has genuinely passed.
- It sends your licence and machine identifiers and the update window your licence carries, and nothing about your library or what you listen to.
- Its job is to confirm the licence has not been refunded or withdrawn, and to pick up a renewed licence file after an upgrade.
- If it fails for any reason, it fails silently. No error, no interruption. Your licence file keeps working offline.
Privacy: no account, no tracking lists every connection the app makes on its own, including this one.
Going offline for a while
Nothing happens for a month. A paid licence carries a 30-day offline window measured from the last successful check, and any successful check resets it. A machine that is online in the normal way never comes near it.
Seven days out, a dismissible strip tells you premium features will pause in so many days unless the licence can be re-verified. It is information rather than an alarm and will not interrupt what you are doing.
What "needs reconnect" actually means
If the window does run out, the app moves to a state it calls needing a reconnect:
- Premium tools pause. You sit on the same footing as the free tier, with the allowances described in What the free allowance covers.
- Your library keeps playing. Every track, gapless, EQ and all. Playback is never gated in this app, in any state.
- One output setting steps down. Exclusive mode is a Lifetime feature, so while the licence is unverified the app opens your sound card in Shared mode instead. The change lands at the next track or the next time you seek. Your saved preference is untouched and is honoured again the moment the licence clears. Choosing an output mode covers the difference.
- Nothing is deleted or hidden. Your files, tags, playlists and history are untouched.
- A banner explains it, and that one cannot be dismissed, because it is the only thing telling you why the premium controls went quiet.
The banner deliberately does not say you are offline, because that may not be true. Checks can fail while your connection is perfectly healthy: an outage on our side, or a firewall or DNS rule that blocks only our address, looks identical from inside the app.
Getting premium back
There is nothing to click. In this state the app retries far more often than weekly, starting at roughly every two minutes and stretching the gap out to a maximum of about half an hour, so a licence server coming back up is not hit by every machine at once. The moment a check succeeds, premium returns in that same session, without a restart. After a long outage that can take up to about half an hour.
If it still has not cleared well after that, check that nothing on the machine is blocking the app's outbound connections, then use Report a Bug in Settings. See Is this a bug? How to report it.
Refunds and withdrawn licences
If a licence is refunded, charged back, or disputed, the check reports it and premium stops there and then. Any other reason for a licence being withdrawn, a routine key reissue for instance, is not an immediate stop: a 30-day grace window follows, and the app keeps working through it while you sort the licence out.
Either way, when the grace is over you land on the free tier, not on a locked app. It is the same soft landing a trial gets when it ends, described in Your free trial.
Two more offline cases
A first run with no connection. The 30-day trial is issued by our server, so a first launch with no network cannot start one. The app stays on the free tier, tries again quietly in the background, and starts the trial the moment it can reach us. Your music plays throughout.
A licence that no longer matches the machine. After a Windows reinstall, or if the licence file was copied from another computer, the app drops to the free tier and premium waits for you to activate again. Never below the free floor, and never a stop. Activating your licence covers freeing up a machine slot and re-activating.