What Spindl does that a spreadsheet cannot
Spindl catalogues vinyl, CDs and cassettes by scanning them, then keeps working: it writes about the records you own, recommends music based on your shelves, tracks the pressings you are still hunting, and prices the collection as the market moves.
Getting records in
Three ways in, because a collection is never all one age.
- Barcode scanning against a local 16.7-million-release catalogue — fast enough to use standing in a shop.
- AI cover recognition for anything with no barcode, with the candidate pressings shown before anything is saved.
- Manual entry with a proper form, for private presses, promos and the record nobody has ever catalogued.
- CSV export whenever you want your data out. It is your collection.
Knowing what you actually own
The difference between a list and a catalogue is that a catalogue knows which copy.
- Pressing-level detail: label, catalogue number, country, year, format, barcode.
- Market value per pressing, with monthly value history so you can see the collection move.
- Condition grading for media and sleeve, with a queue that walks you through the ungraded ones.
- Duplicate detection that understands editions — a second pressing is a different record, not a mistake.
The part that is not an inventory
This is where Spindl stops being a database. Most collection apps stop at the list and the price.
- A daily feed about records you already own: how they were made, where the cover came from, what happened that year — written from public sources, and it says so.
- Recommendations that come from your own shelves, not a popularity chart, including the albums missing from artists you already collect.
- Hunts: pick an artist, see what you are missing, and mark the exact pressing you want — the UK original, the Japanese copy. Scan it one day and it ticks itself off.
- Shelves and smart shelves: by format, genre, decade or your own rules, filling themselves as you scan.
- A map of nearly 26,000 record shops in 156 countries, with trips you can plan before you travel.
- Song identification, previews, and links out to Discogs, Wikipedia, Amazon and eBay from any record.
What it does not do
Spindl is not a marketplace: you cannot sell records through it, and we take no cut of anything. It does not price every pressing perfectly — market data is thin for obscure records, and where it is thin we say so instead of inventing a number. And it cannot read a sleeve that no database has ever seen; that record gets typed in by hand like everyone else's.