WaxStax

Point. Tap. Identify.

Catalog any record in 3 seconds — even the ones with no barcode.

Point your phone at a vintage label. Tap IDENTIFY. Claude vision recognizes the pressing, Discogs delivers canonical metadata and live marketplace pricing, and the record drops into your local collection. Catalogue the box you've been avoiding for two years — in an evening.

Get Free Early Access Free download · no subscription · bring your own keys · ~$0.003 per scan billed direct to Anthropic. 🔒 No backend. No account. No cloud sync. Your collection lives on your phone.

How It Works

Frame The Label

Open the Scan tab. The viewfinder is a square HUD with corner brackets — line up the center label of the record, the catalog number, or the album cover. WaxStax doesn't need a barcode and doesn't care about sleeve damage. Hold steady.

Tap Identify

A single 1080p still goes to Claude Haiku 4.5 with a strict tool-use schema. Claude returns artist, title, label, catalog number, year, country, confidence, and a one-sentence reason. Round-trip is typically under three seconds. Costs about a third of a cent.

Confirm & Collect

WaxStax searches Discogs by catalog number first, then artist/title, scoring every candidate against Claude's identification. The best match shows up as a confirm card with cover art, full metadata, and live marketplace pricing. Tap Add to Collection.

What Does It Actually Do?

You buy a record at a shop, a flea market, an estate sale. The sleeve is generic, the catalog number is rubbed off, the band's name is in a script you can't read. You could spend twenty minutes typing fragments into Discogs hoping for a hit — or you could point your phone at it. WaxStax sends one frame to a vision model trained to recognize records the way an experienced shop owner does: by label design, era, typography, regional pressing tells. It hands the answer to Discogs to get the canonical release ID, and that goes straight into your collection.

No barcode required. No account required. No subscription. Your collection exports back to Discogs as a clean CSV.

Built For The Records Other Apps Give Up On

Tired of typing every record into Discogs?

Point. Tap. Done in three seconds. Catalogue a 100-record stack in an evening — not a weekend. Claude reads the label, Discogs delivers the canonical release, and it lands in your collection with one tap.

— No keyboard required

Vintage label with no barcode and faded ink?

That's the design target. WaxStax was built specifically for the records OCR-based scanners can't handle — vintage pressings, regional editions, white-label promos, scripts in languages you can't read. Vision identifies labels by typography and design.

— Vintage · regional · promo · rare

$2 bin or $200 grail? Need to know now.

Live Discogs marketplace pricing — lowest, median, highest sold, plus how many are for sale and the have/want ratio — appears on the confirm card before you reach the till. Price every record before it leaves the table.

— Live pricing on the confirm card

Sick of subscriptions stacking up?

Free download. No paywall. No "unlock the good stuff" tier. Bring your own Anthropic and Discogs keys — you pay Anthropic about a third of a cent per scan. That's it. $5 of credit covers ~1,500 identifications.

— ~$0.003 per scan, transparent

Don't trust apps with your collection?

There is no WaxStax backend. No account. No cloud sync. No analytics SDK. No third-party trackers. Your collection lives in SwiftData on your phone. Outbound calls go straight from your device to Anthropic and Discogs using your own keys.

— Privacy by design, not by promise

Already on Discogs? Don't want to start over?

Export to Discogs's exact CSV import format with release IDs intact — clean dedupe, no duplicates. Or push directly to your Discogs collection from inside the app, with auto-skipping for records you already own. No lock-in. Leave any time.

— Discogs CSV · JSON · XLSX · live sync

Who Is This For?

You've been meaning to get the back-catalogue onto Discogs for two years. Every weekend you start, type six records, and quit. WaxStax kills the typing tax. Pickups land in your local catalogue in three seconds with the Discogs release ID already attached. Export a CSV when you're ready — everything dedupes cleanly.

A box just arrived and you need to price it before the seller changes their mind. WaxStax pulls live Discogs marketplace stats — lowest, median, highest sold, num for sale, have/want ratio — right onto the confirm card. Price each record before it leaves the table. Triage a 200-record estate buy in under two hours.

You're elbow-deep in a $2 bin and the dealer is watching. Is this the original UK pressing or the cheap reissue? Tap. Read the catno. Decide. Move on. Your saved scans turn into a digger's notebook you keep on your phone — with prices, conditions, and notes for the next fair.

Someone left you a stack of records and you have no clue what's in it. Don't guess. Don't pay a "valuation service." Point your phone at each label, tap, and let WaxStax tell you in plain language what the record is and what it's worth. Decide what to keep, sell, or pass on — with real data instead of vibes.

Features

Square Viewfinder HUD

Camera preview is on-device only — frames never stream off your phone. A sci-fi HUD with corner brackets and a soft scan line keeps you oriented while you frame the label. Tap to focus. Torch toggle for dim shop lighting.

LLM Identification

One still per IDENTIFY tap goes to Claude Haiku 4.5 with a strict tool-use schema. Returns artist, title, label, catalog number, year, country, confidence, and reasoning. No OCR brittleness. Vintage and regional pressings are the design target.

Discogs Match Scoring

Catalog-number-first search, falling back to artist+title, then free-text. Every candidate is scored: +40 for a catno match, +20 each for artist / title / year, +10 each for label / country. The best-scoring release becomes the canonical match.

Live Marketplace Pricing

Lowest, median, and highest sold prices. Number for sale right now. Have / want counts. Cached for 24 hours, refreshable on demand. The same data Discogs shows on its release pages — surfaced the moment a record is identified.

Local Collection

SwiftData-backed grid and list views. Sort by date added, artist, title, year, purchase price, or estimated value. Filter by tag, condition, label, or year range. Full-text search across every field. Built to scroll smoothly past 500+ records.

Grading & Provenance

Per-record media + sleeve condition (Goldmine grades from Mint to Poor), purchase price, date, source, landed cost, personal rating, freeform tags and notes, and a folder name that maps directly to your Discogs collection folders.

Discogs CSV Export

Export to Discogs-import-ready CSV (release_id intact for clean dedupe), generic CSV, JSON, or XLSX. Conditions translated to Discogs's exact strings. UTF-8 with BOM. RFC 4180 quoting. 1000-record exports finish in under five seconds.

Privacy By Design

No accounts. No backend. No cloud sync. Your collection lives in SwiftData on your device. The only network calls are explicit shutter stills to Anthropic and metadata lookups to Discogs — both declared in the App Store privacy section and the privacy manifest.

Bring Your Own Keys

Free download. No paywall. No subscription. Paste your own Discogs personal access token and Anthropic API key in Settings — both stored in Keychain. You pay Anthropic directly for vision identifications. Average cost: about a third of a cent per scan.

See It In Action

🎯

SCAN HUD

Square Viewfinder

💽

CONFIRM CARD

Locked Result

💰

MARKETPLACE

Live Pricing

🗂

COLLECTION

Grid View

📤

EXPORT

Discogs CSV

Real screenshots arrive with the TestFlight build.

The Identification Pipeline

WaxStax replaces the brittle continuous-OCR pipelines used by most barcode-and-text scanners with a single high-quality vision call. The model has seen enough records to recognize a Blue Note pressing by its typography, a Trojan reggae 7" by its label color, an early Stones UK pressing by its boxed Decca logo. It returns structured JSON, not free text — every field comes back in a known shape.

Camera frame → JPEG. One ~1080p portrait still per shutter tap, encoded at 85% quality. The live preview never leaves the phone.
JPEG → Anthropic Messages API. Sent with the identify_record tool: strict: true, additionalProperties: false, every property required. Empty string and 0 are the "unknown" sentinels.
Tool-use response → IdentifiedRecord. Decoded with JSONDecoder — never substring-matched. Rough fields like Unicode and forward-slash escapes are handled by a typed JSON value parser.
Discogs search → scored candidates. Catno-first, then artist+title, then free-text. Each result scored against Claude's output. The best match becomes the canonical release.
Confirm card → SwiftData. Cover thumbnail, full metadata, marketplace stats, Claude's confidence and reasoning. One tap to add to your collection — or reject and try again.

Compatibility

Ideal

iPhone 13 or newer

Cold launch in under two seconds. Snappy camera, fast network, plenty of headroom for SwiftData with thousands of records.

Best

Required

iPhone · iOS 17+

SwiftUI and SwiftData baseline. iPhone-only at launch — universal binary runs on iPad without a custom layout.

Min

Network

Online for scans

Identification needs Anthropic + Discogs. Browsing your saved collection works fully offline — exports too.

Hybrid

Everything In The Box

No "Pro tier." No add-ons. No "advanced features unlocked." The whole app, free. You only pay Anthropic directly for the vision calls.

✓ Vision-Based Identification Claude Haiku 4.5 reads any vinyl label — vintage, regional, faded, white-label, foreign script. Strict tool-use schema returns structured JSON every time. $120/yrFREE
✓ Discogs Match Scoring Catalog-number-first search with three parallel queries. Every candidate scored against Claude's identification with a strong-match rule that prevents wrong releases. $60/yrFREE
✓ Live Marketplace Pricing Lowest, median, highest sold prices. Number for sale right now. Have / want ratio. Cached for 24 hours, refreshable on demand. $96/yrFREE
✓ Goldmine Condition Grading Built-in M / NM / VG+ / VG / G+ / G / F / P grading for media and sleeve, mapped to Discogs's exact import strings. $24/yrFREE
✓ Local SwiftData Collection Grid + list views, full-text search across every field, six sort options, five filter axes. Built to scroll smoothly past 500 records on iPhone 13. $48/yrFREE
✓ Discogs CSV Export Discogs's exact 13-column import format with release_id intact for clean dedupe. UTF-8 with BOM. RFC 4180. 1,000 records exported in under five seconds. $36/yrFREE
✓ Generic CSV · JSON · XLSX Exports Three more formats for spreadsheets, scripts, and lossless backup. Pure Swift XLSX writer — no heavy dependencies. $24/yrFREE
✓ Push-To-Discogs Sync One-tap upload of new pickups to your live Discogs collection. Pre-flight dedup against your existing folders. Per-record condition + notes pushed automatically. $60/yrFREE
✓ Privacy By Design No backend. No account. No cloud sync. No analytics SDK. No third-party trackers. API keys live in iOS Keychain. Camera frames never leave the device except as explicit shutter stills. pricelessFREE

Total Value $468/yr → $0

Get Free Early Access