Scan the record. Everything else fills itself in.
Spindl is a record collection app for vinyl, CD and cassette collectors: you scan a barcode or photograph the sleeve, and the record is catalogued in seconds with its artist, year, label, country, pressing and market value already filled in.
1. Point the camera at the barcode
Most records pressed since the mid-eighties have one. Spindl reads it against its own copy of the Discogs catalogue — 16.7 million releases held locally — so a scan usually answers in well under a second, in a shop, on bad wifi.
It comes back with the exact pressing, not just the album: the label, the catalogue number, the country, the year, the format, and what that pressing is currently worth on the open market.
2. No barcode? Photograph the sleeve
Anything older than about 1985 has no barcode at all, which is exactly the part of a collection worth cataloguing. Take a picture of the cover and AI reads the artist, title, label and catalogue number off the sleeve, then searches for matching releases.
It never saves the first result on its own. You get the candidates with the year, format and label of each, and you pick the copy you are holding — because a 1971 UK original and a 2015 repress are different objects at very different prices.
3. Confirm the pressing
This is the step most collection apps skip, and it is the one that decides whether the value figure means anything. Spindl shows you the editions side by side with sleeves, years, labels and catalogue numbers, and fills in the tracklist and the blanks once you have chosen.
It never overwrites something you typed yourself.
4. Then the collection starts talking back
A catalogue is a list. What you do with it afterwards is the reason to keep it: a daily feed about the records already on your shelves, recommendations drawn from what you own rather than from a chart, hunts that track the exact pressings you are missing, and shelves that file new arrivals by themselves.