vinyl – B12 Solipsism

Dirty Records

May 31, 2023May 31, 2023 Seth Anderson0 comment

A brand new vinyl still needs to be cleaned (presumedly from the paper sleeve) before dropping the needle.

I use an www.audioquest.com/accessories/vinyl-accessories/super-co… anti-static brush, and this is the typical result. But only takes a few seconds, and vastly improves my audio enjoyment by removing the source of pops and clicks…

Super-Conductive Anti-Static Record Brush

Featuring 1,248,000 super-conductive carbon fibers, our new record brush gently reaches into the groove, pulling out dust and dirt that would otherwise snap, crackle, and pop through your speakers. Don’t let those little intrusions turn into big interruptions.

Vinyl LP Catalog Project Update -The Analog Universe Has Its Own Rules

December 19, 2021 Seth Anderson2 Comments

As an update to my vinyl LP project, previously mentioned, I’m approaching the end of my first phase. As of tonight, I have added 581 LPs to my Delicious Library 3 catalog, with maybe another 75 LPs to go, or close to that number. I haven’t counted them. Not a huge collection obviously, but one that is important to me.

I’m still compelled to add new physical media to my shared space, but luckily, Covid-19 has stopped me from visiting local record stores and paying their rent by buying everything interesting. So far, only Discogs, and Ernie’s Millions Of Records have benefited from my renewed interest in vinyl.

By now, my routine is fairly well polished, and occurs in roughly this order. The analog universe has its own rules.

1. Pull an LP off the shelf. Take it out of the plastic sleeve, if it has one. If it doesn’t¹, give it one. Take a photo with my iPhone² of the cover, back cover, and any interesting details, including the inner sleeve, or inner gatefold, or the vinyl label. If the LP doesn’t have a good inner sleeve, replace it.

2. Look at the etched runout markings. If I have my reading glasses on, I will note those and search Discogs for the proper edition. If I can’t make them out, I will guess based on year of purchase³ or on other unique identifiers on the spine or cover. Some LPs have had hundreds of pressings, thus I will admit that I am not always successful, some of my Discogs IDs are no doubt incorrect. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have yet to look up an LP that was not listed at Discogs fwiw. I have only had to contribute 2 or 3 additions/corrections, a great ratio. Crowd-sourced data and the “old school” internet is good when it works!

3. Look up the LP in the Delicious Library 3 interface. This is often harder than it could be, especially for older LPs. It works well when there is a barcode on the LP, a barcode that still exists, that is. About 20% of the barcode lookups fail because the LP is not in Amazon.com’s database. Also, the Delicious Library 3 text search bar is ludicrously small, and once you type, “vinyl”, you can only see the next couple of words. Better to copy and paste from the Discogs site, but of course I don’t always remember to do this. Besides, the Amazon 3rd Party Marketplace is hit/miss with titles. A large percentage of my library doesn’t have a barcode – I’m guessing late ’80s was when the barcode became standard on album covers.

Delicious text entry

If this process works well, the Amazon lookup populates my Delicious Library catalog with accurate info about title, artist, label, release date, current retail value, and even nice artwork. If the process works partially, I still save myself some typing, but I may have to use my own photo of cover art, correct label info, and so forth. I would estimate I’ve had to hand-type about 50 LPs so far.

Because I’m sorta nutty, I then copy track info, and other credits from Discogs into the Delicious Library entry. Not nutty, maybe a better epithet is data enthusiast. I don’t always care, but sometimes I’m curious who the guest guitarist was on the 3rd track, or who wrote this song on Side 2, yadda yadda…

4. Look at the physical disc, make sure it isn’t warped, or has big scratches visible on the vinyl. I’ve been lucky and only ten or less of these LPs have been too physically damaged to play. I’ve always tried to take good care of my LPs, but ya know, other humans live on this planet. Plus the universe tends towards entropy.

5. Put the LP into my Record Washer MKII. This is a crucial step, but I didn’t always use it early on in my process. I do now though, with a bath of distilled water and a capful of Spin-Clean Washer Fluid⁴. I try to switch out the bath every week, or when it begins to smell a bit “off”. While I spin the LP 3 times counter-clockwise, I cogitate; when I subsequently spin the LP 3 times clockwise, I count down in my best Casey Kasem voice, “3, 2, 1, play…”

6. I have about 7 or 8 microfiber cloths that I use in a rotation to clean the MKII solution and schmutz off the LP. I prefer to do this during the day so I can stand by my office window and use natural light to ascertain if there are finger smudges or whatever that I can remove. If I didn’t like the album art photo I took previously, I’ll try again.

7. The best part! Playing the damn thing! Drop the needle down, and dance where appropriate! Or play air guitar! or air bass! Whatever! To be truthful, not every record demands full attention from my ears. Sometimes I’ll be working on other records, preparing them with the above mentioned steps until they are ready to play. In other words, at any time, there are several LPs in each of the above steps. For instance, right now I have 8 LPs that are ready to play as soon as I queue them up, another 10 that still need to be cleaned and dried, another 20 or so that I haven’t looked up in Discogs.com yet, plus those other ~75 that I haven’t even started on.

8. Depending upon circumstances, I may research the album at Wikipedia and/or Allmusic.com to get a feel for critical response. Depending upon the artist, there can be quite a lot of history about a particular album. Most of these albums I acquired before the public internet even existed, I might not have realized what a particular artist was all about, or why a song swerves in this particular way, or who knows what weirdness I’ll stumble upon on the internet. Factoids are a certain kind of brain candy.

What’s next? After I finish my journey through all these albums, I plan to alphabetize them. I haven’t yet decided to do a straight ABC alphabetization, or a genre/alpha sort.⁵ I might need a couple more shelves actually.

Next I want to digitize the albums I don’t have already in my music library. I’m a bit leery of this step; I tried to digitize a John Lee Hooker LP and it sounded like absolute shit. Not sure if my needle was bad, the LP itself was too worn⁶ or other factors. I will try again though, there is too much gold on these shelves.

Footnotes:

something like 20% didn’t have an outer plastic sleeve, or was corroded in some way [↩]
using the square setting [↩]
if I recall [↩]
whatever is in it, some anti-static compounds I would guess [↩]
Blues LPs, sorted by alpha, Jazz LPs, sorted by alpha, etc. [↩]
though it sounded fine on my phonograph [↩]

Shoutout to Join Together by the great Doug Adams

February 24, 2021 Seth Anderson0 comment

The great AppleScript iTunes master, Doug Adams, created an app a while ago that allows me to join together LP sides so they play in the sequence as originally released on vinyl.

For me, I use this to emulate listening to an LP in iTunes. Sometimes I only want to hear a particular side of an LP that I’m familiar with. I don’t want to shuffle it, I don’t want to hear the whole thing, perhaps I’m listening on my headphones while on my treadmill, or walking around avoiding carjackers or whatever.

In the pre-digital days, you put an album on your turntable, and only one side played. If you wanted to hear the other side, you had to get up and flip it. Or you could listen to something else.

Producers or artists sequenced their albums accordingly. There were many heated discussions about which track came first on a side, which track closed the side, yadda yadda.

Of course, you can choose which tracks to listen to in whatever order you choose, even on a vinyl record, but it takes more effort.

The genius of Join Together is that once you create the music file, you can just queue that one file.

Here is my procedure, which works in iTunes¹

1. Select the files which constitute a side of an LP. For instance, today, I used Glass Eye’s Hello Young Lovers² – looked up the track order at Discogs.com, and copied the tracks that were on side A to Join Together.

2. In Join Together, entered in the “Name” field, “Hello Young Lovers – Side 1”, and also added the phrase “JoinedTogether” to the Grouping field.

3. I personally make every digital file as large as possible so they sound better, so I chose 320kbps as the export.

4. After the merged AAC file is completed, it is added to my iTunes library.

5. I use the Grouping field so that I can add all of these album sides to a Smart Playlist³, and also exclude it from certain Smart Playlists⁴

6. Then duplicate this procedure to create Side 2. Voilà!

Double LPs take longer, or triple LPs like Sandinista! give 6 files, or maybe even less…

There are some LPs that I always skipped a certain song, this can be recreated in Join Together. For another favorite album of mine, Meat Puppets II, when I used to play it in my college years, I always skipped Side 1 track one, and started on the second song. Sometimes I would play the 1st track later at the end, but I felt strongly that the first song, Split Myself In Two – a punk thrash song – didn’t fit with the mood of the rest of songs. Later on, after some other songs played, it was ok to hear, but not as the first song. So when I created this LP in Join Together, I simply put Split Myself In Two at the end of Side 1. Perfect!

Same with some LPs that the CD version added new songs. They don’t always “fit”, so why play them? For instance, the LP of Sonic Youth’s Sister has less songs than the CD version. Skip ‘em! I felt they changed the mood, so why include them?

Anyway, Join Together is well worth the $5 Doug Adams charges.

Footnotes:

I haven’t upgraded to a Mac that requires the new version called Music, yet [↩]
which I had on vinyl when I lived in Austin and now own on CD [↩]
I have 10 sides that sync to my iDevices, based on not hearing them in the last few weeks [↩]
specifically, New Rips, i.e., songs that I’ve only listened to less than 5 times [↩]

Join Together – A New-To-Me App to Recreate Spinning Vinyl Sides

August 1, 2017August 1, 2017 Seth Anderson0 comment

The Replacements – Tim, on vinyl.

Yesterday I realized that iTunes 12.x doesn’t have an option to merge two or more music tracks into one. I thought iTunes used to have this functionality, but perhaps I was mistaken. I could have dug out my original CD, and merged the songs that way, but after briefly Googling, I discovered that Applescript master and long-time iTunes expert Doug Adams has built a (Mac only) app that performs this very task. Cool!

Join Together will create and export a single AAC or ALAC audio file from the audio data of tracks dragged from iTunes or files dragged from the Finder, leaving the original source tracks and files intact.

(click here to continue reading Doug’s Apps for iTunes – Join Together – v7.7.3 – Official Download Site.)

Or as Doug added on Twitter:

I use it to make Side 1, Side 2, Side 3, Side 4 tracks, etc of my favorites (London Calling, Exile on Main Street, and so on) https://t.co/Jjf6vsKqIk

— dougscripts (@dougscripts)

August 1, 2017

Quality LP sides have their own internal logic & mood, as sequenced by the artist/producers. Each LP side can even have its own character. Breaking up albums into single songs in iTunes defeats the artist’s intent. I realized there were many albums that I owned that would benefit from being joined together like this. Mostly albums from before CDs became the default medium, I’m guessing in the early 1990s.¹

An LP that has been played many, many times embeds itself in your brain as it is sequenced. Of course, thinking back, I often did skip a particular track on some albums if I wasn’t otherwise occupied, but usually I would play an entire LP side, and then maybe not even flip it over, but move on to the next LP.

Wu-Tang Clan’s debut LP

Albums that I loved on vinyl enough to replace on CD, aka Desert Island Discs; LPs like Highway 61 Revisited, or London Calling, or Kind of Blue, Electric Ladyland, individual songs that should be heard together in sequence like the Grateful Dead’s China Cat Sunflower and I Know You Rider, or even the short songs that make up the second side of Abbey Road; these are ideal candidates for Join Together.

Whenever I played the Meat Puppets 2, I always played the second side first, as I thought the first song on the first side² was too jarring, and unlike the rest of the LP. When I use Join Together, I’m going to recreate that playing experience. I don’t need to hear Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” more than once or twice a year, so I’ll make a version of Led Zeppelin IV -Side 1 without Stairway³. Same with the Velvet Underground & Nico: how many times a year do I want to hear “European Son”?

Big Star – first album

Footnotes:

I was a late hold-out, and didn’t purchase my first CD until I couldn’t find a vinyl version of Sonic Youth’s Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star [↩]
“Split Myself in Two” [↩]
I often would pick the needle up after hearing the first few notes [↩]

The Silence of Vinyl Records

November 16, 2015 Seth Anderson0 comment

Silence rules everything around me…

Recently, I was alone for an afternoon, without any pressing tasks to complete, so I decided to pull out my turntable¹ and listen to a few records. I listen to music all the time, and have a vast, horder-esque iTunes library, but I’m often too lazy to play records. I sat in a room I call The Lounge, and spun a half dozen LPs. Some I only wanted to hear a song or two from, some I listened to in their entirety, both sides.

Such a different experience, as I’m sure you’d concur. I won’t go into the debate here over sound fidelity, and warmth, and all that. In honesty, I don’t want to give up the convenience of being able to walk around with hundreds of my favorite albums in my pocket, or the ability to instantly play a song in my car. Vinyl does wear out, and there is that crackling, popping sound that does not exist in digital versions.

The vinyl experience is different in other ways. I didn’t realize when I purchased my turntable, but it doesn’t have an automatic shut-off feature. In other words, I need to be actively listening or else the album will continue to spin for hours, wearing out the turntable’s needle. I’ve incorporated this negative feature into my ritual of listening to records. I put the needle down on the song I want to hear², sit down holding the album jacket, study the cover art, read the liner notes, and listen with my full attention. I have the option of listening via³ desk top speakers, or a⁴ headphone amplifier with comfortable over-the-ear headphones.⁵

Curating playlists on my Mac is one of my hobbies, creating mixes of songs and albums based on topics and phrases, or genres, or concepts, or years, or events; but that means the music never stops playing. In contrast, when a record is finished, there is silence. Silence until the next LP is selected, or until the current record gets flipped over. I guess one could say listening to a CD would be similar, but my first (and only!) CD player was a six disc shuffler – again, when music was on, it kept going and going, filling up the nooks and crannies of available aural space.

I was surprised at how significant the empty spaces were, especially on a quiet afternoon.

These are the records I played⁶

of Montreal – the past is a grotesque animal

Otis Rush – Blind Pig records

Leo Kottke, Ice Water

Songs of Kristofferson

A Love Supreme – John Coltrane

Otis Rush – Tops

Footnotes:

an Audio-Technica AT-LP120-USB Direct-Drive Professional Turntable [↩]
or the beginning of the LP, of course [↩]
an Audioengine [↩]
Schiit Magni [↩]
a Beyer Dynamic DT-880 [↩]
there might have been one or two more that I didn’t think to photograph [↩]

Dirty Wurds 45 – Caped Crusader Records was uploaded to Flickr

January 30, 2015 eggplant0 comment

Chicago Garage Rock

embiggen by clicking
http://flic.kr/p/q3wA91

I took Dirty Wurds 45 – Caped Crusader Records on January 30, 2015 at 10:51AM

and processed it in my digital darkroom on January 30, 2015 at 04:51PM

Dirty Wurds – 45 – Not This One / Mellow Down Easy was uploaded to Flickr

January 30, 2015 eggplant0 comment

Chicago Garage Rock

embiggen by clicking
http://flic.kr/p/qH5pDr

I took Dirty Wurds – 45 – Not This One / Mellow Down Easy on January 30, 2015 at 10:49AM

and processed it in my digital darkroom on January 30, 2015 at 04:50PM

The Black Hippies was uploaded to Flickr

June 9, 2014August 11, 2014 eggplant

a vinyl re-release of the mid-70s debut album of a Nigerian funk band. From Reckless Records.http://ift.tt/1uKOabi

Rough Trade has this to say about it:
High quality reissue of great and unbelievably rare Afro Rock Lp. Appeals to fans of Psych, Fuzz, African, and Funk. Licensed directly from Pazy (Band Leader, Lead Singer and Guitarist). Pazy (real name Joseph Etinagbedia) started playing music in the Fire Flies in the city of Warri in Nigeria in 1973. The area was in the midst of an oil boom, and like most bands on that scene, the Fire Flies played American and European pop hits mixed with Jazz and Highlife for the largely expat audiences in local clubs. Along with an influx of foreigners, the oil boom also gave rise to an emerging Nigerian youth market, and soon Pazy formed the Black Hippies to play the uniquely African style of hard rock that was favoured by this new audience. They quickly found success and were appearing alongside other Warri-based artists such as Tony Grey. In short time, they came to the attention of EMI and their legendary producer Odion Iruoje, who recorded this album. By the time it was released in 1977, though, Disco and Funk were starting to take over and the hard fuzzy rock of The Black Hippies first album was somewhat behind the times. As a result, the album was barely released and is now virtually unfindable, unseen by all but a few of the most hardcore collectors. Pazy would go on to form a new line up of the Black Hippies that played mostly Reggae but this remains by far the best album. Featuring whiplash funk drumming, searing fuzz guitar, raw vocals and that uniquely West African organ sound, The Black Hippies first album is a definitive classic of the genre. Beautifully remastered with restored artwork, this release stands alongside our Ofege and Psychedelic Aliens releases as restored gems from a largely unknown but incredibly vital Rock scene in 70’s West Africa.

embiggen by clicking
http://flic.kr/p/nTy4go

I took The Black Hippies on June 07, 2014 at 02:46PM

and processed it in my digital darkroom on June 07, 2014 at 08:37PM