The shelf gets a voice
Every record in your collection has a story. The pressing plant that cut it. The session musicians who played on it. The cultural moment that made it matter. Until now, those stories lived in your head or scattered across liner notes you had to dig out of the sleeve. Spinstack 1.4 changes that. It is the biggest update since launch, and it touches every surface of the app.
Fifteen new features. Three of them redefine what a vinyl collection app can do. The rest sharpen everything around them. Here is what shipped, why it matters, and how to use it. For the complete feature breakdown, see the full 1.4 release notes.
AI Liner Notes
This is the headline feature, and it earns the top billing. AI Liner Notes uses Apple Intelligence to generate rich, contextual writing about every record in your collection. Not generic Wikipedia summaries. Writing that understands your specific pressing, your condition notes, your listening history, and your shelf context.
Point it at a first pressing of a classic jazz record and it will note the mastering engineer, the studio, the label run, and why that particular cut sounds different from the reissue two slots over. Point it at a sealed 180g reissue and it will tell you what to expect when you finally crack the shrink. The depth scales with the data you have already given Spinstack about your collection.
AI Liner Notes appear across six surfaces: the record detail view, the shelf browser, the listening log, the widget, the Siri card, and the Apple TV display. Every word is generated on-device using Apple Intelligence. Nothing leaves your phone. No server. No cloud model. No data collection. The feature is entirely opt-in, toggled in Settings, and can be turned off at any time. Your collection data stays private, period.
This is not a gimmick bolted onto a catalog. It is a new layer of understanding that makes your library feel alive. The records you already own become more interesting because the app can finally articulate what makes them worth owning.
Groove Vision
Grading vinyl by eye is subjective, inconsistent, and slow. Groove Vision replaces guesswork with sensor data. It uses the LiDAR scanner and camera on supported iPhones and iPads to scan the physical surface of a record and produce a suggested Goldmine grade. For a deeper look at the technology, visit the Groove Vision page.
The system evaluates condition across a four-axis gate: surface wear, scratch depth, warping, and edge condition. Each axis contributes to a composite score that maps to the standard grading scale. You can accept the suggestion, override it, or use it as a second opinion alongside your own assessment.
What makes Groove Vision more than a party trick is community training. With your opt-in permission, anonymous scan data feeds back into the model, improving accuracy for everyone over time. The more records the community scans, the sharper the system becomes. Early testing shows the model already outperforms casual visual grading for detecting hairlines and light surface wear that the naked eye tends to miss.
Groove Vision works on any record you own, whether it is in Spinstack or not. Scan first, add later. This is the feature that turns AI-assisted identification from a novelty into a daily tool.
Siri Shortcuts with Cards
Siri integration is not new to Spinstack. But in 1.4, it gets a visual upgrade that changes how it feels to use. Seven Siri Shortcuts now return rich visual cards complete with cover art, metadata, and actionable buttons. Ask Siri to log a spin and you see the album cover, the pressing details, and a confirmation. Ask for a random pick and the card shows the record with its last play date and condition grade.
The shortcuts cover the actions collectors use most: log a spin, random pick, recent additions, collection stats, search your shelves, check a value, and start a listening session. Each one returns a card that feels native to the Siri interface, not a text dump pretending to be useful. This is voice-first collection management that actually works in practice.
Last.fm Hub
If you have been scrobbling for years, your Last.fm history is a goldmine of listening data. Spinstack 1.4 introduces a full Last.fm Hub that imports your scrobble history and overlays it onto your vinyl collection.
The result is a new dimension of insight. Total plays per album across your entire listening life. In Your Collection cross-references your top streamed artists with the records you own on wax. Wantlist Candidates surface artists you stream heavily but do not own on vinyl. Forgotten Favorites remind you of records on your shelf you have not streamed in months. A Last Spin Home card sits on the Home tab, showing your most recent scrobble next to your most recent Spinstack spin. Two timelines in one glance.
Last.fm sync is lightweight, respectful of rate limits, and pulls only the data Spinstack needs. It does not write to your Last.fm profile or alter your scrobble history. It reads, correlates, and displays. That is it.
Heavy Rotation
You stream an album three times in a week. You own it on vinyl. Why are you not spinning the wax? Heavy Rotation answers that question by matching your recently played Apple Music albums against your Discogs collection. The intersection shows up in a dedicated surface. Each matched record has a Log Spin button. The feature is on-device only. No listening data is uploaded, written to CloudKit, or sent over any network.
Gift Mode
Finding records for friends who collect is a puzzle. You do not want to buy what they already own. You do want to buy what they have been hunting. Gift Mode solves this. Opt in to any friend's profile. A new "Gift Mode" scope appears in Search. Type a record and each opted-in friend gets a section. Green "On Wishlist" chips lead. Grey "Already Owns" badges follow. Buy for friends without buying duplicates. Your friend never knows you opted in. Private wishlists fall back to collection matches only.
Discogs Marketplace
Selling records used to mean tabbing between Spinstack and the Discogs website. Not anymore. Discogs Marketplace lets you list, price, and manage your inventory from inside the app. Open any Release Detail page, tap "Sell on Discogs," set price and condition, and publish. A dedicated Sell Hub in the Stacks menu shows active listings, sold items, and pending orders. Buyer messages display in-app through the Discogs messaging API. Discogs handles all payment between buyer and seller. Spinstack takes no commission, no fee, no cut.
Listening Sessions and Ambient Mode
Logging spins one at a time is fine for casual tracking. But a real listening night deserves a container. Listening Sessions let you name the night, group multiple spins under a single session, and preserve the sequence. Friday jazz night. Saturday morning cleaning stack. The impromptu three-record run that started with one album and ended somewhere unexpected.
When a session is active, Spinstack puts a Live Activity on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, showing the current record, elapsed time, and session name. You can add records to the session from the Lock Screen without unlocking your phone. The session becomes a first-class object in your listening history, browsable and searchable long after the night ends.
Ambient Mode pairs with sessions to turn your iPad or Apple TV into a display. The current record fills the screen with cover art, metadata, and AI Liner Notes. It is the digital equivalent of propping the sleeve on the shelf while the record plays. Beautiful, functional, and entirely optional.
Custom Records and Vinyl Shelves
Not every record lives on Discogs. Test pressings, private releases, handmade lathe cuts, and local pressings often have no database entry at all. Custom Records let you create a full catalog entry from scratch, with your own cover photo, metadata, and notes. On-device OCR reads the sleeve and pre-fills title and artist. The record behaves exactly like any Discogs-synced entry: it appears in your shelves, logs spins, shows up in analytics, and syncs through iCloud. Five free records for everyone. Unlimited on Pro.
Vinyl Shelves are now the default home layout. Covers lean or stand. Today's Pick opens the Discover tab with a full-bleed magazine hero, deterministic per calendar day. For more on cataloging, see the guide to LP cataloging apps.
The B-Side: Rebuilt
The social layer grew up. Ten reactions replace the old single-heart system. Block and Report work from three surfaces: swipe a row, long-press a card, or open the profile menu. Trending in Your Circle shows records your friends are spinning right now. Albums in Common includes cross-pressing match, meaning different pressings of the same album count as shared. Notification frequency lets you choose instant, every 30 minutes, hourly, every 4 hours, or off.
Pressing and Matrix Codes
Two copies of the same album from the same label can sound completely different depending on the pressing plant and the mastering chain. Pressing codes and matrix numbers are the fingerprints that identify exactly which version you own. Spinstack 1.4 adds dedicated fields for both, visible on the record detail view and searchable across your entire collection.
You can pin the exact version of a record to your catalog entry, compare pressings side by side, and filter your library by plant or matrix prefix. For collectors who care about the difference between a Masterdisk cut and a Sterling cut, this is the metadata layer that has been missing from every mobile app in the category.
iPad Polish and Seven Languages
Twenty surfaces redesigned for iPad. Discover hero, Insights grid, Crate Dig cards, sheets, charts, and forms all get dedicated iPad layouts. Sensible heights, breathing room, balanced columns.
On the localization front, Spinstack 1.4 ships with 2,667 translation strings across seven languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Croatian, Japanese, and Korean. Korean is new. Every new 1.4 surface ships localized on day one. Long translations in German, Spanish, and French degrade gracefully to icon-only buttons on narrow screens. VoiceOver still announces the full action. 107 builds. 317 Swift files. Zero third-party dependencies.
Available now
Spinstack 1.4 is available today on the App Store. It is a free update for all existing owners. If you are new, the app costs $9.99 once. No subscription. No recurring fees. No paywalled tiers. Every feature described here ships to every user.
There is a free 30-day trial with no credit card required. Download it, import your Discogs collection, and see what your shelf looks like when the app finally understands what is on it.