Spinstack 1.4 Ships AI Liner Notes, Groove Vision, and Seven Siri Shortcuts That Answer With Cards
Kirkland, WA, June 1, 2026. Spinstack, the indie vinyl-collection app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, ships version 1.4 today. It is the largest release in the app's history: 107 TestFlight builds across six months, touching every surface a collector sees. The headline is AI Liner Notes, an opt-in layer that uses Apple's on-device language model to write personalized text about a collector's own records. Nothing leaves the phone.
1.4 also ships Groove Vision, a close-range condition scanner that uses the camera and LiDAR to detect surface marks at half-millimeter scale. AppIntent snippet cards turn every Siri shortcut into a visual answer with cover art and action buttons. A full Last.fm hub surfaces lifetime listening stats alongside the vinyl collection. Listening Sessions give names to the nights. And The B-Side adds a tab that shows reactions friends have left on your spins.
"A vinyl collection is not a list. It is a self-portrait. Every record on your shelf is something you chose. Every spin is something you returned to. Other apps treat that like a database. Spinstack 1.4 treats it like the way you actually listen."
-- Vaha, developer
AI Liner Notes
Apple's on-device Foundation Models framework now writes short personalized text in six places across Spinstack. The feature lives in Settings, under Spinstack Labs, opt-in and off by default. It requires Apple Intelligence.
Vinyl DNA writes a narrative paragraph about a collector's archetype based on top genres, decades, labels, and collection size. Crate Dig pitches each card in one sentence about the collector's shelf. Sonic Connections explains each hop in the strongest-chain graph. Spin Log suggests moods from freeform listening notes. Release Detail summarizes long Discogs descriptions into a pull-quote. Spin Log Analytics says one true thing about the week.
Everything runs on the device. The model never sees a server. If a device does not support Apple Intelligence, the hand-written copy stays exactly where it was.
Groove Vision
Hold the phone four to six inches above the record. The camera reads the surface. The LiDAR feels the depth of the grooves. A small ring on screen turns green when distance, surface flatness, tilt, and steadiness all pass at once.
Groove Vision can spot scratches at half-millimeter scale. It can measure warp. It will not tell you the grade. The heuristic that generates a suggested grade was deliberately hidden until enough collector-corrected scans exist to train a real CoreML model. Until then, the user's eye is the only grade. Factual observations like surface mark count and LiDAR-derived flatness stay visible because those are real measurements, not judgments.
An opt-in contribution toggle lets collectors upload anonymous scan data to a developer-owned training corpus. No user identity, no Discogs username, no release ID, no location. Each upload carries a fresh anonymous UUID. Withdraw all contributions in one tap.
Seven Siri Shortcuts With Cards
All seven Spinstack Siri shortcuts now return a visual card alongside the spoken response. Ask for a random record and get cover art, title, artist, and a gradient tinted by the album's dominant color. Ask what you played last and get the cover with rating stars and mood chips. Ask your spin streak and get a number tile with a seven-day dot strip. Every card has action buttons: Log Spin, Pick Another, Log Again, Played, Skip. Built on iOS 26's new AppIntent snippet views.
Last.fm Hub
Connecting a Last.fm account now unlocks a full lifetime listening profile: total scrobbles, unique artists, unique albums, account age, and country. Top Artists, Top Albums, and Top Tracks surface with a period picker spanning seven days to all time. Loved Tracks and Recently Scrobbled round out the hub.
The In Your Collection section was built specifically for collectors who care about both streaming data and physical media. It intersects Last.fm top artists with the Discogs collection and shows exactly which records match. The artists you listen to most. The ones you own on vinyl. The overlap between them.
Listening Sessions and The B-Side
Listening Sessions give names to the nights. Create a session, assign spins, add freeform notes. A spin can belong to many sessions. The Spin Log reads like a diary: days as headers, sessions inline. Six new mood tags ship with 1.4: Sunday Morning, Date Night, Rainy Day, Nostalgic, First Listen, and Comfort.
The B-Side, Spinstack's private friend feed, adds a You tab that collects every reaction friends have left on your spins, collection adds, and wishlist adds. Friend Compare now renders the full overlap instead of capping at twenty thumbnails.
Also in 1.4
Vinyl Shelves graduate from Labs and become the default home layout: soft reflections, a hairline shelf line, no card chrome. Today's Pick gives the Discover tab a magazine-layout hero sized large on iPad. A personalized onboarding flow asks four quick questions and tunes the app's first suggestions to the collector's style. Your Pressing lets collectors pin down which physical pressing they own when an album has multiple versions on Discogs. Matrix and runout codes appear on barcode results. Custom records, Marketplace improvements, Ambient Mode, and a dedicated iPad polish pass across roughly twenty surfaces round out the release.
Localization catches up with 830 new translation values across German, Spanish, French, Croatian, and Japanese. A global "Ignore leading The" toggle teaches alphabetical sorts to file The Beatles under B.
About Spinstack
Spinstack is built by a solo developer who is himself a working vinyl collector. The app uses CloudKit, WidgetKit, Core NFC, App Intents, Foundation Models, CoreML, ARKit, Vision, TipKit, MusicKit, ActivityKit, Catalyst, and tvOS. Pricing is a single $9.99 unlock with a 30-day free trial. No subscription.
Spinstack is available now at spinstackios.app and on the App Store.