Terms

What you buy, and from whom

Written for singers, not for lawyers: what a recording lets you do, who you are actually contracting with, and how to get your money back. Last reviewed 1 September 2026.

Who you are contracting with

Two parties, and it matters which is which.

Gumroad, Inc. sells you the recording. Every purchase on this site goes through Gumroad as merchant of record: they take the payment, issue the receipt, handle the VAT, and their terms and refund policy govern the sale itself.

DictionAid GbR — Solen Mainguené and Mario Grünkorn, Leipzig — makes the recordings, runs this site and your library, and provides the coaching. Address and contact details are in the Impressum.

What a recording lets you do

You get a personal licence to the recordings you buy: listen to them, study from them, use them to prepare a role for rehearsal, audition or performance, for as long as you want, on any device you sign in from. That licence is yours and does not expire.

What it does not cover:

• Passing the files or your sign-in on to anyone else — a colleague, a class, a choir, a shared drive.
• Publishing them, in whole or in part, or making them available for download anywhere.
• Reselling them, or including them in another product.
• Using them as training data for speech, voice or language models.

A teacher who wants to use a recording with students, or an opera house preparing a production, should write to info@dictionaid.com — that is a licence we are glad to discuss, not one you have to guess at.

Your library

What you buy appears in your library and streams from there. We intend to keep it available for as long as DictionAid exists. If we ever have to close the service, we will give you notice and a way to keep what you bought.

Signing in works by email link. Anyone with access to your inbox can reach your library, so treat that link as you would a password.

Cancelling — the right of withdrawal

As a consumer in the EU you normally have fourteen days to withdraw from a purchase without giving a reason. Digital content is the exception: that right ends as soon as delivery begins, provided you expressly agreed to start immediately and acknowledged that you were giving up the right by doing so.

Gumroad asks for exactly that at checkout, and delivery begins at once. In practice this means a recording you have already been given access to is not returnable as of right.

That is the legal position, not our attitude. If a recording is not what you expected — the wrong edition, an audio fault, a transcription you cannot work with — write to info@dictionaid.com and we will sort it out. Refunds themselves are issued by Gumroad, so we may have to ask you to raise it there as well.

Coaching

One-to-one coaching costs €55 an hour, of which €45 goes to the coach. You book and pay through Gumroad; the session is given by DictionAid or by the coach we match you with, online.

A session you have not yet had is not digital content that has been delivered, so the fourteen-day right of withdrawal applies to it in the normal way until the session takes place.

[Cancellation notice period for a booked session — to be decided and filled in.]

Recordings we make on request

If a role is not in the repertoire, we can record it. What that costs and how long it takes we agree with you in writing beforehand — there is no fixed price, because there is no fixed scope.

[Lead time we are willing to commit to — to be decided.]

What the recordings are, and are not

Every recording is spoken by a professional opera singer whose mother tongue is the language of the score. The phonetic transcription underneath is a first pass and is marked as such in the player; it is being read back and corrected line by line by a diction coach, and that work is not finished. Where a passage matters to you, check it against your score and, if in doubt, ask a coach.

Editions differ. Where our text follows a different edition than yours, that is a difference, not an error — tell us and we will look at it.

If something goes wrong

We are liable without limitation for injury to life, body or health, for intent and gross negligence, and wherever the law gives you rights we cannot restrict. For ordinary negligence we are liable only where we break an obligation that the contract depends on, and then only for the damage typically to be expected.

The site is a small operation run by two people. We do not promise it will never be unavailable.

Which law applies

German law, without the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the EU, the mandatory consumer protections of your own country still apply to you — this clause takes nothing away from them.

The European Commission provides a platform for online dispute resolution at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. We are neither willing nor obliged to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.

Changes

If we change these terms, the version in force when you bought something is the one that governs that purchase. The date at the top says when this page was last reviewed.