Short answer
Spinstack 1.5 is on the App Store today. It measures record condition with the LiDAR sensor and the microphone, prices your copy at its grade instead of at the market floor, answers an NFC tap with everything it knows about that copy, and runs nineteen AI features on the device with no server behind them. Free update for everyone who already has the app. The full release notes are here.
Every vinyl app on the App Store will let you type "VG+" next to a record. None of them can tell you whether that was true, or whether it is still true after the three hundred plays since. That gap is what 1.5 is about. It took 51 days, 131 TestFlight builds and 715 automated tests, and the result is a version of Spinstack that treats condition as something you measure rather than something you declare.
Three measurements instead of one guess
The Condition tab is new, and it holds the tools. Groove Vision scans a record with the camera and the LiDAR sensor on iPhone Pro and iPad Pro: four macro captures, and the worst quadrant sets the estimate, because the needle hits every scratch rather than the average one. The result card leads with the scanner's estimate, a confidence level, and one line that matters: Spinstack's estimate, you decide the grade.
Scratch Detection runs during a Silent Session, which is just a side playing while the phone listens. It confirms a mark only when it recurs across plays, so a speck of dust does not become a scratch. Then it does the thing nobody else can: every mark is stamped with the loudness of the music around it, so the app can say which ones you will actually hear and which ones stay under the music.
The third measurement is price. Every record with a media grade now shows what that specific copy is plausibly worth, not just the lowest listing on Discogs. A Near Mint copy roughly doubles the market floor; a Fair copy falls to a tenth of it. Price Watchdog, the Collection Appraisal PDF and the record page all use the same math, so the number agrees with itself everywhere. These are labelled estimates, not appraisals, and the label never goes away.
The Condition Card and the Receipt
Measurements are only useful if you can hand them to someone. The Condition Card is a shareable image of one record: the grades, the play history, and a drawn record with every detected scratch placed where it physically sits in the grooves, sized and coloured by severity. It is the thing a seller puts next to a listing and a buyer trusts more than two letters and a plus sign.
The Condition Receipt is a one-record document for a buyer or an insurer, and it is free for everyone in 1.5. The Collection Appraisal is the same idea for the whole shelf, itemized and condition-adjusted, with Pro.
The Tap Card
NFC tags on sleeves have been a Spinstack thing since 1.2. In 1.5, tapping a tagged sleeve answers with everything the app knows about that copy on one card, instantly and entirely offline: the pressing, the grades and the scan, the current value, the play history, the sound measured from that very copy, and its scratch map. Five actions sit under it, from quick-log to Silent Session. Tags are ordinary passive stickers you buy separately; the app writes them.
Nineteen AI features, and where they run
Ask Your Collection is the one people will try first. Ask about your records in your own words, "do I own anything by Talk Talk?" or "what have I played most this year?", and get an answer from your own shelves, with a receipt of what it checked. It is the first Spinstack feature that gives Apple's on-device model tools: it searches the collection, counts it and reads the listening history itself, which is how it manages to be right.
Sonic Fingerprint measures a record as it plays: tempo, key, loudness, structure, instruments, from the copy on your turntable rather than from a database. Condition Read writes a short appraiser-style note grounded in the record's own evidence. Together with the shorter generated lines across Insights, What to Spin and the price digest, that is nineteen surfaces, and every one of them runs on the device with Apple Intelligence. There is no server-side inference anywhere in the app, because there is no Spinstack server. Every number in generated text is checked against the facts that produced it, and a sentence with an invented number is thrown away rather than shown. If your device does not support Apple Intelligence, the hand-written copy stays exactly where it was.
The record shop workflow
The three scanners received the largest set of changes in this release, and the 7 inch single was the hardest case and the most improved. The macro lens engages up close, Vinyl Vision reads a label like a collector (the barcode in the photo wins, catalogue numbers are never spell-checked, the label's language is detected), and the wishlist reveal makes finding a record you have been hunting feel like something: the screen goes dark, the sleeve rises out of a crate, and underneath it says how long you have wanted it, from your real wantlist date.
Six partner stores now have an App Clip Code on the counter, the newest being Big Love Records in Tokyo. Scan it and a store-welcomed mini Spinstack opens without an install or an account, identifies the exact pressing of anything in the bins, and shows the store's own staff picks.
Watch, TV, and sixteen languages
The Apple Watch app was rebuilt around the turntable. Every screen takes its colour from the sleeve on the platter, the Digital Crown moves the side's finish line, and a wrist spin now carries its real duration, so watch listening finally counts toward stylus wear and listening totals. Apple TV grew from a browser into a member of the family: the whole collection on glass shelves, Spin Reports, the Collection Appraisal and Price Watchdog agreeing with the iPhone to the dollar, and Game Night, a pass-the-remote quiz built from your own records.
And the whole release ships in sixteen languages, including Arabic and Hebrew with full right-to-left layout, 5,496 strings audited one by one at build 127.
By the numbers
169 documented features in the in-app Guide, 28 of them new in 1.5. Nineteen Apple Intelligence surfaces. Twenty-two App Intents for Siri and Shortcuts. Twelve widgets, three Live Activities, three Control Center controls. Sixty in-context tips. 715 automated tests in 73 suites. Zero third-party SDKs, zero analytics, zero ads, zero tracking, and zero new permissions requested.
Android, briefly
Spinstack for Android is in open beta. It carries the core of the app, Discogs sync, the Spin Log, Crate Dig, the barcode scanner and NFC tags, and it does not carry the parts that depend on Apple hardware: Groove Vision, Scratch Detection and the AI features stay on iPhone. The Android page says exactly what is in the build and how to join.
Price and availability
Spinstack 1.5 is available now on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Mac with Apple Silicon, Apple TV and Apple Watch. It is a free update for every existing user. New users get a 30-day trial of everything, then Spinstack Pro is $9.99 once. No subscription, no ads, and the Condition Receipt is free for everyone regardless of tier.
If you would rather watch than read, the user guide walks through every feature with a short clip from the shipping app, with a first-week path for newcomers and a collector's path through the 1.5 condition work.