A record player in your pocket.

The music is already yours and it is already on a machine you own. Mynah plays it the way it deserves to be played, with no account to create, no catalogue to browse and no opinion about what you should hear next.

The record is the interface

Choose an album and it presses onto a record with its own art as the label. Tap the label and it plays. Drag the arm, or tap the record where you want the needle, and the music moves with your thumb. Hold a skip button and it scans, the way the iPod did.

Long albums are cut into sides of about half an hour, because that is what a side is. When one ends the next drops on by itself. Three pressings — black, tinted from the art, or marbled — and a speed switch that means what it says: 33 or 45.

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Your files, and nobody in between

Mynah talks to the Navidrome or Subsonic server you run and to nothing else. FLAC arrives as FLAC. So do ALAC, AAC, MP3, WAV and AIFF, streamed exactly as they sit on your disk, with your server transcoding only what the phone genuinely cannot play.

Star a song and it is starred on your server, where the rest of your listening already lives. Albums download to the device for the plane. The lock screen, Control Center and AirPlay all work, because they should.

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On iPad, the whole turntable

Turn an iPad sideways and the record comes half out of its sleeve with the arm reaching over it. The library is a drawer you pull in from the edge of the screen, so the deck is never something you have to leave to go looking for a song.

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Still on iOS 6

The iPad 4 and the iPod touch in the drawer still work, and nothing modern will install on them. Mynah for iOS 6 was built for those machines rather than ported to them: a stereo turntable with an amber display, and a jukebox in the Music app’s own idiom. Downloads there land in the device’s built-in Music library, cover art and all, and play with the app closed.

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What happens next

Widgets are being built, and then Mynah goes to App Review. It arrives free. Mynah Lifetime, a single purchase shared with your family, will add offline albums, the marbled pressing and Cover Flow, and nothing that is free today will move behind it.

Write back: mynah@theadipost.com. Every letter reaches the person who writes the app.