Headroom: VU Music Player

Headroom plays the music you own, MP3 and FLAC up to 24-bit hi-res, and shows it the way a studio would: on instruments.

SIX VISUALIZATIONS

• Segment VU: a stereo meter above your album cover, which floats as you tilt the phone.

• Analog VU: two needles with real spring physics. Gravity pulls them, a shake makes them bounce.

• Equalizer: left and right dot-matrix spectrum with peak hold.

• CRT: the spectrum inside a glowing tube. Tilt your iPhone and look into it in 3D.

• Goniometer: the stereo image as a phosphor vectorscope, with correlation and width.

• Soundstage radar: frequency bands placed on a stage, turning with your AirPods' head tracking.

Tap a board for focus mode: the controls slide away and the visualization takes the whole screen.

CRATES

Flip through your library like a crate of records. Swipe to flip, flick to riffle, tap a sleeve to pull it out and see the vinyl. Sort by album, artist or what just came in, with A–Z dividers and an index to jump. With headphones in, rest on a record and its hook plays in your left ear while your song keeps playing in the right, like the cue on a DJ mixer. Prefer lists? One tap switches to a plain track list with search.

A DECK, NOT A WIDGET

Chunky transport keys with travel and haptics, a waveform scrub bar with fine scrubbing, a rolling tape counter and a volume knob that follows your iPhone's buttons. Meters are calibrated to each track's loudness automatically, so loud masters and quiet recordings both swing around 0 VU.

YOUR FILES, OFFLINE

• Import files or whole folders from iCloud Drive or any Files location. They're copied to your iPhone and always play offline.

• Play straight from a USB-C drive without copying anything.

• Tags and covers from ID3 and FLAC, with an optional lookup that recognizes a track by its sound and fills in a missing cover and details. You review every change first.

• Background playback, lock screen and Control Center controls, AirPlay and Bluetooth.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN

No account, no ads, no analytics, no tracking. Your music never leaves your iPhone. Headroom only goes online when you ask it to look up a track.

No music yet? Tap "Try a Demo Track" and hear what Headroom can do.