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“For those who still buy the record and the ones who make them”: Homecrate combines a local music player and 8-track pocket DAW into one nifty app
What can $9.99 get one in 2026? Apparently, quite a lot.
After apps like Reel recently turned the iPhone into a pocket tape recorder, another music-maker-focused app is now attempting to replace both your music player and your DAW at the same time.
Meet homecrate, a new app for iOS, macOS, and visionOS that combines a local lossless music library with an 8-track spatial DAW, complete with built-in plugins, AI-assisted music tools and voice control. The core music player is free to use, while a $9.99 one-time Pro upgrade unlocks the recording and production features.
Developer Anthony Burchell says he began building the app after My Bloody Valentine briefly pulled their catalogue from Spotify last year – a moment that inspired him to create a music player-meets-production studio “for the people who still buy the record and the ones who make them”.
“Streaming made music convenient. It also made it forgettable and ephemeral. I wanted to fix that for myself and ended up building something I use every single day,” says Burchell.
At its core, homecrate is built around ownership and on-device privacy. Users can import FLAC, WAV, MP3 and ALAC files directly into the app, while synced karaoke-style lyrics, artist biographies, liner notes and discographies populate automatically through a self-hosted metadata system – meaning no third-party accounts, rate limits, or mandatory cloud syncing.
The app’s algorithm also leans heavily into user control. Rather than relying on an opaque streaming-style algorithm, homecrate lets listeners actively tune recommendations using adjustable sliders, including mood-based and even weather-reactive discovery settings.
On-device AI can also answer questions about a user’s personal library using only the files stored locally on the device itself. All analytics and processing are kept entirely offline so you can say goodbye to good ol’ data harvesting.
Beyond playback, homecrate also packs in a surprising number of musician-focused extras, including a built-in metronome with MIDI clock output and custom accent patterns, a guitar tuner covering 15 tuning families, CarPlay support and home screen widgets with full playback controls. Refreshingly, the free version also comes without artificial feature restrictions – something increasingly rare in modern music apps.
The $9.99 Pro upgrade unlocks the more ambitious side of the app: a full 8-track DAW with voice controls powered by on-device Apple Intelligence. That means you can literally tell the app to arm tracks, move clips or generate chord progressions in a specific key, all without lifting hands from the instrument you’re playing.
Three AUv3 plugins – a NAM amp modeller with IR cabinet loading, a polyphonic synth with MPE support, and a drum machine – are also bundled in.
Music generation itself runs through the Tonic music theory library, which analyses the mix to detect key and BPM before generating MIDI clips based on music theory rules rather than what Burchell describes as “probabilistic guesswork”.
Then there’s the spatial audio side – arguably the app’s most ambitious feature. Each track in the DAW has a 3D position picker in the mixer. homecrate records and exports projects using APAC, Apple’s new 4-channel First Order Ambisonics format introduced with iOS 26, alongside a stereo AAC fallback. The exported file can thus be played back with full spatial positioning and AirPods head tracking intact
In essence: the space you build in the DAW becomes the same space listeners hear during playback.
“I implemented APAC using the iOS 26 AVAssetWriter APIs, working from Apple’s technical specification. Developers on Apple’s own forums were still asking how to do it at the time. There are very few shipping implementations outside of Apple’s own software,” says Burchell.
homecrate is available now on iOS, macOS and visionOS. The base music player is free, while the Pro upgrade costs $9.99 with no subscription or account required.
Learn more at homecrate.
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