Plinthe: Vinyl in Space
Anyone who keeps records knows the quiet loss that happens when you catalogue them. The collection on your shelf has spines and sleeves and an order you rearranged twice last year for reasons that made sense at the time. Enter it into Discogs and all of that flattens into a table: rows, artist, title, year, catalogue number. The information survives and the object disappears. Plinthe is a small, precisely aimed app that hands the object back, and it does it by giving the catalogue a room to live in again.
The setup is refreshingly free of busywork. Plinthe reads the collection you already keep on Discogs, so you connect the account once and everything you own is simply there. There is no second library to maintain and nothing to re-catalogue, which matters enormously, since the fastest way to kill a collection app is to ask someone to type in nine hundred records before it becomes useful.
What you get in return is scale. Your covers lay out in a 120-degree arc around you, at a size they have not been since you were standing in the shop deciding. You look at a record and pinch to bring it forward; you pinch and drag to move along the shelf. Behind the sleeve, a visualizer tinted from the album’s own artwork breathes along with the music, which is a nicer idea than a generic waveform because the colour is coming from the record you happen to be playing rather than from a preset. Tap a track and it plays, streaming in full through Apple Music if you subscribe and as public thirty-second previews if you do not. Time-synced lyrics pulled from LRCLIB scroll above the sleeve as the track runs.
There is a real appreciation for browsing built into this. Digital music solved retrieval and quietly destroyed discovery within your own collection, because a search field only ever gives you the thing you already thought of. An arc of album art at full size does the opposite, and it puts you back in the position of noticing a record you had forgotten owning because your eye happened to land on it.
Plinthe is free, needs a Discogs account with a collection in it, and is independent of Discogs, LRCLIB and Apple alike. Scott Finkelstein has built the kind of app that only makes sense on this hardware, one that does a single thing with taste rather than a dozen things adequately, and record collectors are exactly the people who will recognise the difference.
Twineye
Spatial video is one of the genuinely convincing things about Apple Vision Pro, and it is also the format you have the least of. Everything shot before you owned the headset, everything sent to you by someone else, everything downloaded over the years, all of it is flat. Twineye exists to close that gap. It takes an ordinary video and converts it into a spatial video you can watch on Vision Pro, and it does the whole job on the device in your hands.
The technical claim worth paying attention to is that the depth model ships inside the app. There is no network step, no upload to somebody’s conversion server, and no data collection. That matters more than it might sound, because the obvious way to build this feature is to push your footage to a cloud GPU and mail back a result, which means handing over home video to a third party and waiting on someone else’s queue. Twineye keeps your files where they already are.
It is also free in the way the word is supposed to mean: no subscription, no in-app purchases, no ads. The app runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro, so you can convert on whichever device happens to be nearby and watch the result in the headset. That flexibility is useful in practice, since the library you most want to convert usually lives on a phone or a Mac rather than on the headset itself.
There is a hardware requirement to be aware of before you start. Conversion depends on MV-HEVC encoding, which means an iPhone 15 Pro or an iPhone 16 or later, a Mac or iPad with Apple silicon, or Vision Pro itself. Older iPhones can run the app but will not be able to do the encoding work, so check what you are converting on before you plan a big session with the family archive.
For anyone who has watched a spatial clip in the headset and immediately wished the rest of their footage looked like that, this is the least demanding way to find out how well it translates. It costs nothing to try, it does not ask for an account, and the source files never leave your device while it works.
pikap: Vinyl Record Player
Pikap takes a very specific, very charming idea — turning your Apple Music library into a room full of vinyl records — and builds an entire spatial app around it. Rather than presenting your music as a flat list or grid the way every other player does, Pikap renders each album in your library as a physical record sleeve, complete with its actual cover art, sitting in a crate you flip through with a flick of your hand. Pull one out, and instead of just tapping play, you set it on a turntable that’s actually rendered in your space, watch the tonearm drop, and listen as the platter spins.
It’s a small ritual, but it’s the kind of thing that only really works in a headset — the appeal isn’t efficiency, it’s the tactile pleasure of physically choosing and placing a record the way people did before streaming made every song equally accessible and equally weightless. Pikap leans into that on purpose, offering multiple turntable designs to switch between, from a clean modern hi-fi setup to a vintage console and even an old suitcase-style player, so the whole listening corner can match whatever mood you’re going for.
Because it pulls directly from your existing Apple Music library, there’s no separate catalog to manage or subscription to layer on top — every album you already have becomes part of the crate automatically, with your own cover art doing the work of making each shelf look personal rather than generic. The developer notes more turntable and crate customization options are coming, which suggests this is meant to keep expanding rather than staying a one-time novelty.
At $8.99 it’s priced like a proper app rather than an experiment, which feels fair given how much craft is visible in the turntable animations and the shelf-browsing interaction. For anyone who misses the physical act of picking a record before they listen, or just wants their Vision Pro music setup to feel less like a control panel and more like a room, Pikap is an easy one to recommend.