The store

You give it access to your Apple Music library. That's the whole setup, and you do it standing in the doorway: the photograph is up first, almost at full strength, and then the store resolves in front of you. It's a real place, a real store, photographed. It stays behind everything you do, the same room in every space, because you're walking through one store and not switching between screens.

Then the room dims to its evening level, and the store's own furniture arrives over it — the search field, the way through to the next room, and the two things set out for you.

You land on the Main Floor.

Everything you own. Three ways to file it: by genre, A–Z by artist, by decade. Pick one and the whole floor refiles.

Records sit in bins the way they sit in a store, one proud of the others. You move through them with your thumb — a swipe sends one to the back, and holding the swipe riffles the crate. On a Mac the arrow keys do the same under your cursor. Tabs down the side let you jump to an artist, and a panel tells you what's behind every letter.

Two things sit out rather than filed. The Store's Pick — one record set out that day. And Last played — what you had on. Neither plays by itself. They're the store putting something on the counter as you come in, on your Mac or iPad.

Filing follows store convention, not software convention. Bowie under B, Miles Davis under D — that's how the store files by default, and you can tell it to do the opposite. Where a record's artist is blank or ambiguous the app works out who it's really by; where it genuinely can't tell, it says so instead of guessing.

Four more, in a line. You push the store sideways and the photograph goes past under your thumb, at exactly the speed you push it — so it reads as walking rather than paging. On a Mac you take the room names at the top.

Singles & EPs — browsed exactly like the Main Floor. On a Mac or iPad the records are smaller, because a seven-inch is smaller than a twelve-inch.

The Counter — what you've played lately, wherever you played it. An album you listened to in the car through Apple Music is on the Counter when you come back.

New Arrivals — what's come into the library recently, banded by week.

And the fifth room is the Cassettes — which is a story of its own.