Curiosities in Vinyl
leejo.github.io
leejo.github.io
As a (former) seller, I found that their database has virtually every release and every pressing of every record ever recorded. More or less. If you bought the thing in a retail channel of any sort, they've got it.
The buyers and sellers, with very few exceptions, are really nice. Altogether a great experience.
> In a world where the whole philosophy is based on mood swings, limited attention spans, and an expansion pack for everything; putting on a record, sitting down to do nothing else but listen to it? That’s where the real value lies.
I also suffer from the paradox of choice... the more options I have, the more skeptical I am of the choice I make and how it negatively affects my experience. When I pull out a record and play it through, I usually love the experience. I can't say that about playing something on Apple Music or Spotify. Same reason why I can't find a game (one of over a thousand) to play on Steam, but loved every minute of the terrible NES games I owned as a kid.
For me it's also in the ritual of getting up to physically select the item I want to hear, withdraw it, and set it up on the player.
It's something you have to do deliberately. It won't shuffle for 100 hours through every option available.
You play a record, it’ll just play.
Here is the original song (Respect, Pt. 3):
Record collections, libraries, etc. all gave me this feeling - of spontaneous, unguided, content discovery. Where you’d find little known content on the shelf right next to a household name. Nobody competing for your attention, nobody trying to “buy” their way into your attention span. You’d discover something interesting, sit down, and lose yourself in it.
It’s part of what made me build https://audile.app, I wanted to spontaneously discover music I’d never find through modern distribution channels. It’s just Math.random() on top of Deezer’s catalogue. I tried to treat Deezer as a “record collection” and spontaneously/randomly discover content in the collection in a similar way as picking a random shelf and combing through the stack of records.
I think I’m the only one using it, and it’s still missing something, but it’s the closest to scratching that itch I’ve gotten so far.
As a side note, here is a list of curiosities in optical:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_albums_with_tracks_hid...
I have still have my set of 1210s (same design but gun metal colour instead of silver) from 1996. I gigged them pretty hard, schlepping them to a couple of regular bar gigs 2 or 3 nights a week for about 5 years.
They still play just like new today, 25 years later. I’ve never even replaced the cue lights.
They just got the design right. The right amount of torque, a good arm and really reliable.
For comparison I also have a wonderful Technics SP10 I got from a old radio station and a Rega Planar 2.
They’re both great hifi decks but a different kind of animal.
IIRC it was an NSC thing.
Early Detroit Techno was just so damn cool. :D
Not sure if it’s just nostalgia for the times but the only that seemed as exciting to me is the early days of Jungle and Drum and Bass.
Probably just ‘cause I is old.