Most apps hide their experiments. Spinstack gives them a room. Spinstack Labs is where the newest, least finished ideas live, the features that are promising enough to ship but honest enough to call experimental. Everything in Labs is opt-in, off by default, and runs on your device. Here is what is in the room today.
What Spinstack Labs is
Labs is not a beta program or a separate download. It is a section inside Spinstack where experimental features get turned on one at a time. As of 1.4.3, each experiment gets its own page, so you can read exactly what it does before you enable it. The rule is simple. If a feature is powerful but still finding its footing, it goes in Labs, clearly marked, until it earns its place in the main app.
That framing matters because the Labs features are ambitious. They use the camera, the microphone, LiDAR, and on-device machine learning to do things a collection app has never really tried. Calling them experimental is not a disclaimer. It is a promise that they will keep getting better, and that you decide when to use them.
AI Liner Notes
AI Liner Notes uses Apple's on-device language model to write personalized text about your collection in six places: Vinyl DNA, Crate Dig, Sonic Connections, Spin Log moods, Release Detail summaries, and Spin Log Analytics. It reads the shape of your shelves and puts words to it, the way a good liner note puts words to a record.
It is opt-in and off by default, it requires Apple Intelligence, and nothing leaves the phone. The model runs locally, so the writing about your collection stays as private as the collection itself.
Groove Vision
Groove Vision turns your iPhone into a condition scanner. You hold the phone four to six inches above the record, and a guidance ring measures four signals in real time: distance, flatness, tilt, and steadiness. When all four pass, the ring turns green and the scan begins. You get a condition read you can keep right next to your existing notes.
LiDAR is what makes it more than a camera trick. It adds true distance instead of a guess, angle precision so a slight tilt does not skew the result, and independence from lighting, since depth does not care how bright the room is. Groove Vision runs on iPhone Pro and iPad Pro models with a LiDAR sensor.
Scratch Detection
Scratch Detection is the newest experiment, and the most unusual. You turn it on in Labs, start a Silent Session, and drop the needle. Spinstack listens through the microphone for surface scratches and places each one on a map, track by track. When it can match the audio to Apple Music, it pins a scratch to the exact moment. When it cannot, it estimates the position from track lengths.
A spot starts tentative and becomes confirmed when it shows up in the same place across several plays. You can open the Scratch Map from any release you have played, see scratches grouped by track, and even hear the moment a scratch happens. The audio is analyzed live on your device. Short verification clips stay local, and if you choose to contribute anonymized clips to research, that choice is yours and reversible.
The principles behind Labs
The three experiments look different, but they share a spine. Everything runs on your device. Nothing is on by default. Each feature explains itself on its own page before you turn it on. And none of it phones home with your data. The microphone in Scratch Detection, the camera in Groove Vision, the language model in AI Liner Notes, all of it stays local.
That is not an accident. A collection is personal. What you own, what you play, and what shape your records are in is nobody's business but yours. Labs is built so that even the most ambitious features respect that line.
Where Labs goes next
Labs is a moving target by design. Features graduate when they are ready, new ones appear when they are promising, and the ones that do not work get cut without ceremony. The point is not to ship everything. It is to keep trying things a vinyl app has never had a reason to try, and to let collectors decide which of them earn a permanent place on the shelf.
If you want to see what is in the room today, open Spinstack, go to Settings, and find Spinstack Labs. Read the pages, turn on what intrigues you, and leave the rest off. That is the whole idea.