If you haven't discovered Discogs and want to buy vinyl records: head there now. Even if they don't have something you want, you can set up a Wantlist so that when it does go on sale, you'll be notified.<p>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.<p>The buyers and sellers, with <i>very</i> few exceptions, are really nice. Altogether a great experience.
I think the author eloquently articulated the reason why I still enjoy vinyl (despite not having bought any in the past decade, I have 300 records from the preceding decades):<p>> 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? <i>That’s</i> where the real value lies.
I remember record collections - they were before my time but the older generation still had them. Music discovery was delightful, you’d comb through a stack of music and find something you’d never heard before, drop it on the record player, and listen cover to cover.<p>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.<p>It’s part of what made me build <a href="https://audile.app" rel="nofollow">https://audile.app</a>, 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.<p>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.
This was a neat article.<p>As a side note, here is a list of curiosities in optical:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_albums_with_tracks_hidden_in_the_pregap" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_albums_with_tracks_hid...</a>
The feel of physically manipulating vinyl is one thing I really enjoy about DJing. Gentle touches to the spinning platter and adjusting the pitch microscopic amounts to perfectly match two different records is a wonderful art.
Detroit's Underground Resistance also had a release called Hidden In Plainsight that has two "parallel" grooves, so two independent tracks on the same side.<p>IIRC it was an NSC thing.