Scan a Record
Hear the Music
Print a Label
Point your phone at a record label and hear it instantly, then print labels, price tags, and info sheets for your records.
Made by a DJ, for DJs.
Point your phone at a record label and hear it instantly, then print labels, price tags, and info sheets for your records.
Made by a DJ, for DJs.
Have you been in a record store without a listening station? ...or the needle was broken? ...or just want to hear what you're holding - right now?
Hear the record within seconds via Apple Music with full album context and tracklist. Falls back to YouTube when a match isn't on streaming.
OCR, barcode scanning, and album cover matching: multiple strategies work together to identify your records against a catalog of 7.5M+ pressings.
Musical key in Camelot codes, BPM detection, and a waveform view: everything you need to read a record and plan your next mix straight from a scan. Tap along to set the tempo by ear.
Don't trust a BPM you didn't check. Long-press the BPM badge and Doctor Beat loops a bar of the track seamlessly at the tempo you dial in; if the loop drifts, the number is wrong. Doctor Key does the same for the key, playing the scale over the loop so you can hear the fit.
Set a crate active and every record you scan drops straight into it. Flip through it like a real bin, or print a crate sheet: a one-page rundown of everything you brought, covers and catalog numbers included. Pro members can print every label in the crate in one batch run.
Log in with your Discogs account to manage your collection and wantlist, browse release images, and see live marketplace pricing in multiple currencies.
List a record for sale straight from a scan. Pick the exact pressing, grade media and sleeve condition, and set your price from Discogs's suggestions, then save as a draft or publish live.
Three label types from one sheet: DJ labels with BPM & key, seller price tags with live Discogs values, and full info inserts on 4×6 or 8×11. Every label carries a QR code that plays the record even faster than a cover/label scan.
White label? Promo? Worn beyond reading? Browse your Discogs collection or type a label by hand, then dial in position, time, BPM, and key with a Camelot wheel, no camera required.
Can't decide what to spin? Tap ROLL and Label Mate plays a random record you own. Long-press to roll your wantlist instead.
Scan a record that's on your wantlist and Label Mate flags it on the spot, plus a heads-up when the record in your hand sells for over $50.
Auto-add every record you scan to an Apple Music playlist and build your digital collection as you dig in the physical realm.
Every crate-digging trip becomes a story card: a mosaic of everything you scanned with the total haul value, sized for Instagram Stories. Single finds share as polished cards too.
Getting from a label image to the right track is a waterfall of decisions, each step narrowing the field, with a fallback ready whenever one comes up empty. It's also self-improving. Every scan benefits future scans for the person after you of the same item by populating metadata.
Apple's Vision framework reads every line of text on the label, building consensus across multiple camera frames, so glare, shadows or a shaky hand doesn't throw it off. It corrects for common misreads like H / N or an upside-down label.
From that raw text, Label Mate determines catalog-number candidates, artist names, and titles, splitting fine print and throwing out boilerplate. The catalog number is the strongest signal, so it leads.
Candidates go to Label Mate's catalog service in a single batched request, matched against 7.5M+ catalog numbers. It parses over all releases each one belongs to, with artist and format attached. Barcodes and album covers feed the same lookup, but more direct.
When one catalog number maps to several pressings, the artist and title read off the label break the tie. If the number turns up nothing, the cascade falls back to resolving straight from artist + title instead.
Before a song plays, the chosen release is verified against Apple Music. Fuzzy matching handles punctuation, featured artists, and various-artists compilations so you land on the real track, not a re-recording or a lookalike.
The full tracklist loads into the player. Each track streams from Apple Music; when Apple Music doesn't have it, Label Mate falls back to a YouTube video, and when you don't have an Apple Music subscription, you'll still hear a 30-second preview.
No text to read on an album jacket, so covers go through a different pipeline: cast a wide net, order the catch, then get geometric proof.
The cover is cropped out of the camera frame and distilled into a compact visual fingerprint on your phone. That fingerprint is compared against nearly two million album covers in Label Mate's index, pulling back a shortlist of look-alikes in a fraction of a second.
The shortlist gets reordered using everything else the camera saw: any words caught on the jacket are matched against artist and title, the cover's color palette is compared, and better-known releases get a nudge, so the real record rises to the top.
Before anything auto-plays, the top candidates face a stricter test: hundreds of distinctive points on your photo are geometrically matched against the real artwork. If one cover truly locks on, it plays immediately; if it's genuinely ambiguous, you pick from the top matches instead.
Deliberately AI-avoidant. There's no chatbot in this pipeline asking a generative AI "what record is this?". That costs seconds and ultimately is a guess. AI doesn't know about the local indie band. Visual fingerprints and geometric verification answer in milliseconds and prove the match. In a record store, speed is a feature.
Honest fine print: no identification system is perfect. A very worn or damaged label, an obscure private pressing, or a jacket with reissued artwork can slip past a scan. When that happens, try the cover, the barcode, or better lighting. Bright, diffused light is best. The catalog is refreshed monthly, so a record released last week may not match yet, and music that never came out on vinyl isn't in the look up at all.
Label Mate is not a static catalog. The records you scan, the tempos you tap, and the keys you confirm quietly teach it, and the next person to pull that record out of the bin gets the answers you found. It gets better the more it gets used.
Scan a record and the app works out which Apple Music track that pressing really maps to, which YouTube video is the right one when it never made it to streaming, and which barcode belongs to which pressing. Tap out a tempo, or settle a BPM and key with Doctor Beat and Doctor Key, and that's an answer too. You’d be surprised how often automatic key and BPM detection gets it completely wrong.
Nothing is taken on one person's word. A value has to be independently corroborated before it's promoted into the shared database, so a mistapped tempo goes nowhere. BPMs are folded across octaves first, so someone counting a track at 70 and someone counting it at 140 are treated as agreeing, because they are.
Because of this: Eventually, the BPM and key are already filled in when you scan a record. Every record. The right song plays first time instead of everyone having to search on YouTube or various streaming services. The tunes that streaming forgot... still play. Pressings that no data dump has ever heard of resolve from their barcode. That's thousands of diggers doing the work once, for each other. Thank you all!
Anonymous, and yours to switch off. At Label Mate, we don't like making accounts for things. You don't either. You'll never need an account to access Label Mate, and it will remain that way. Contributions carry no personally identifiable information, no device identifier, and nothing that ties a record back to you: a catalog number, a tempo, a key, a video id. And if you don't want to contribute: it's one toggle in Settings, “Help improve the database”, and turning it off costs you nothing in the app. Details are in the privacy policy.
From the crate to the speakers to the printer: swipe through what a dig looks like with Label Mate.
Walkthroughs of the workflows DJs and sellers use every day.
Five free scans and three free label prints every day. Go Pro for unlimited everything.
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