Questions, answered
at booth volume.

A desktop app that catalogs your record collection on your hardware, syncs with Discogs when you want it to, and helps you build DJ sets from the records you actually own.

If you've ever kept a spreadsheet of your records and scribbled a setlist on the back of a flyer — PhaseCrate is those two things, properly.

Two overlapping crowds:

• DJs who play vinyl. You need to organize your records by BPM and key, build sets you trust, and walk into the booth with a printable setlist tucked in the sleeve.
• Collectors. You need catalog numbers, pressings, sleeve grades, prices paid, and a backup that isn't someone else's website.

It's not built to manage digital files or prep USBs. It's built around the records on your shelf.

Every record, every crate, every note lives in a single file on your computer. The app reads and writes that file directly.

If you go offline, lose Discogs, or unplug the internet — everything you've stored still works. Cloud sync, when you opt into it, mirrors your collection to a private per-user database so it's there on your other devices.

There's no record limit. We've been tested up to ~80,000 records (a record-shop owner in Lisbon — hi, João) with no perceptible slowdown. The bottleneck is your sleeve scans, not the metadata.

No. You can use PhaseCrate entirely offline, type records in by hand, and never authorise Discogs. It's just easier with — catalog numbers auto-fill, sleeve images come down, and release details fill themselves in.

Two-way. On first connect, we pull your Discogs collection into PhaseCrate. From then on, turn Auto-sync on and your local edits push back to Discogs automatically; leave it off and your changes stay on your machine until you import again.

Your local file is always the working copy. Pushes to Discogs that fail are held in a retry list rather than dropped, so a flaky connection never costs you an edit.

It's broken on us twice. We patch it, push an update, and your local data is unaffected — because the local data isn't living on Discogs.

If Discogs ever truly disappears, the sync stops working but your collection doesn't.

Today this is all-or-nothing: Discogs Auto-sync covers your whole collection. Leave it off and everything stays local to PhaseCrate; turn it on and your collection syncs back to Discogs. Per-record exclusions aren't available yet.

Three places, in priority order:

• Automatic detection (with Cloud) — PhaseCrate finds public previews for every release (Beatport, Traxsource, YouTube) and runs BPM + harmonic-key detection on those in the background. No audio import on your part.
• Discogs release data, where the community has filled it in.
• Manual entry when neither of the above exists.

You can always override any of these. The original sources are kept as a paper trail.

No. PhaseCrate is built around physical records, not the digital files on your hard drive. It looks up public previews for each release and analyses those — your audio collection stays out of it.

That keeps the app focused on the vinyl side: what you own, and what's in the bag for Friday night.

Each set has a name, venue, start time, and running time, and you arrange its records into colour-coded areas — warm-up, peak, encore, however you work. When you're ready, export a printable gig sheet (or Save-as-PDF) with the running order and the crate-pull list, so you can walk into the booth with it on paper.

The desktop app — yes, forever, no trial, no nags. Cloud is the only paid tier (€4/month or €40/year): sync across your devices plus automatic BPM & key detection.

Even on one machine, Cloud is worth it for automatic BPM & key detection — the cross-device sync only matters once you add a second device.

Your local app keeps working unchanged — every record lives on your machine, so cancelling never touches your collection. Your cloud copy is kept for 30 days after cancellation and then deleted; resubscribe within that window and everything picks up where it left off.

Not yet, but bespoke arrangements exist for record labels and DJ collectives. Email teams@phasecrate.io.

From the desktop app: anonymous, opt-out usage analytics and crash reports — counts and error types only, never the contents of your records. Both can be turned off in Settings → Privacy.

From the website: privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics for pageviews (EU region) — no fingerprinting, no session recording.

From Cloud (if you subscribe): your email, your billing details, and your synced collection, stored in a private per-user database.

Honest answer: technically yes, though we don't. Cloud sync stores your collection in a private, per-user database isolated to your account and encrypted in transit — but it is not end-to-end encrypted today, so PhaseCrate operates the database and could access it. We don't, beyond what's needed to run sync and any support you ask for, and we never sell or share it.

If that matters to you: stay local-only (free) and nothing leaves your device — or wait for end-to-end encryption, which is on the roadmap.

Reset your password the usual way (email link) and sign back in — your synced collection is still there. And because PhaseCrate is local-first, the copy on your own machine is always the source of truth, so a forgotten password never means losing your records.

Our infrastructure is EU-based. PhaseCrate is a Portuguese company, GDPR-native — we don't process your data outside the EEA without your explicit opt-in. The full list of the services we rely on is in the Privacy policy.

Not today. PhaseCrate is desktop-first — the table view, the Set Planner, and the dense column layouts need a real screen to make sense. Mobile is on the list of things we'd like to build, but only when we can do it well.

Yes. Signed and notarised by Apple. First launch shows the usual "downloaded from the internet" prompt — that's macOS being macOS, not us being shifty.

Probably. We ship a single download that runs on Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Arch, and most other major distributions out of the box. See Download for the supported list.

The app quietly checks for updates when it starts, and tells you if one's available. Installing it — and the restart that follows — only happens when you click to confirm. We never restart your app for you.

Two answers. First — your collection is a single file on your machine, in the open, widely-supported SQLite format. Any SQLite tool can open it directly, so you never need us to get at your data.

Second — the desktop app source is held in escrow and released as open source if PhaseCrate ever shuts down. Same for the cloud sync server.

Two of three: no. We're a bootstrapped, profit-aligned company. We don't have investors to satisfy. AI — only if it solves something boring and only if it runs on your machine.

We build what we hear most from people actually using PhaseCrate. The current focus is making the things already in the app — Set Planner, Record Player, Discogs sync, the harmonic wheel — sharper and faster, before adding new surfaces.

If there's something missing for the way you dig, tell us at hello@phasecrate.io.