Vital Vinyl

Little by little I have prepared myself for the next project of mine. The goal is to listen through all my vinyls, a couple of hundred of them. Now the time and the mood seems pretty much right for it.

It's bragging time. I bought new triangle-shaped Bang & Olufsen stereo speakers. So they have something else too in Denmark beside that Masturbate-a-thon I was informed by Big A, another friend of mine. Thanks for sharing the news by the way... Back to B&O, I never thought I'd buy anything from them simply because they are so expensive. But my wife wanted something small and definetely not cubic-shaped. So now I have them, and of course I can't blame the sound quality they offer. Although my hearing after all these rock´n´roll years of mine (LOL) isn't as hi-fi as it should.

I also purchased a new Pro-Ject record player, with a USB connection. It's totally non-automatic, which is a big change to my previous, full-automatic vinyl player. The silliest thing is that if you want to change the rotation speed from 33 to 45, you have to take the plate off and manually change the rubber band to another route! That's why I haven't listened to singles yet. Must do it as a separate session I guess.

The old laptop of mine couldn't handle USB 2.0 speed and thus was causing nasty errors in recording the vinyls. I was forced to buy another. This time I waited for a bargain, and it was worth it: a mini-laptop for 265 € with W-LAN, BlueTooth, webcam and of course faster USB ports is now in my possession.

I tried my first recording yesterday. It went pretty well, except for exporting it as MP3. Audacity programme, which is free and therefore above all criticism, didn't allow me to export it - even when I had downloaded the needed plug-in. Finally I found another one which needs to be run from command line. That's a bit trickier, but I like command lines - it brings me back to time where computers were only computing, LOL! However, I should first make a wav file of it before the conversion, so I will try it later (there was a great football game yesterday which occupied my prescious time).

I like to listen to all those records while I record them. Recording will serve as a backup for me, in case of accidents. Or if I decide to sell some records, well, which I probably will because not all of my vinyls are that unforgettable. And it's easier to carry my records in a memory stick or portable hard drive, or in my phone memory for that matter.

In the beginning I'm going to record in two sets, a and b side respectively. Maybe later I divide them into songs, but I wouldn't count on it. The lazyness may rear its ugly head, you know. I guess the needle in the player won't be in too good a shape after all been done and recorded. So I'm going to be careful with not playing anything without recording it. I still have dozens of vinyls bought in Stockholm area that I haven't even listened to, so naturally I will start with those.

The first one to be recorded was by the way American Pie LP, a classic by Don McClean. It's in mint condition. The price tag says '30 kronor' which sounds just about right, don't you think?