How to lose four hundred kilograms.

[reddragdiva]

It's been a wonderful month of house-culling. In the process of getting redcountess's stuff packed for shipping to Australia (paid for yesterday, pickup Tuesday, arriving in Melbourne some time in April), we've thrown out a veritable mountain of shite and regularly overfill our bins with just culls of crap. It's amazing how easy it becomes to clear stuff when you learn to distinguish actually useful things from the pseudo-useful things you think "Oh, that might come in useful" when it really never has and really never will.

So, what do I do with my vinyl records? I've had a USB turntable for four years and ripped zero records. This suggests I never, ever will. Even when I have a vinyl record I want to pull out and play, I seek out and download someone else's rip.

They divide into various categories:

• Australian indie records where the master tapes are long lost and this music literally exists only on five hundred or a thousand pieces of vinyl. This is material of cultural significance that needs preservation. I have vague ideas of sorting these out and sending them to an Australian state library (the Western Australian one was enormously happy to get my fanzine collection, for example). At my expense, of course.
• Other rare material that isn't widely available. Rip and sell?
• Stuff that is currently available on CD. That vinyl is superfluous and can just fuck off.
• Stuff that has previously been available on CD. That vinyl is probably not useful to anyone. There are exceptions, e.g., quite a lot of popular stuff on Mushroom or Festival is not available on CD because Warner, who own most of the catalogue, are fuckwits and won't reissue it.
• Music that is or has been available but the vinyl item is a collectible to some degree. There used to be a slight market for this stuff. Some money for it would be nice, but it was hard enough work selling this stuff ten or twenty years ago and I know nothing about the field in the present day.

So the big win is culling the readily available — is there even a market for this? — and the big unknown is the market for the theoretically saleable.

Suggestions are welcome for how to dispose of this shite in a manner that preserves culture where it's worth the effort, doesn't throw away stuff worth money and — the absolutely key requirement — is not a major pain in the arse to implement.

Edit: Is there anyone who has too much time on their hands and would like to rip the stuff worth ripping? Reward: first pick of the culls!

Comments

[greylock]

News that would have been more useful before you shipped to the UK.

Can you not play it once, rip it once and worry about cutting the files later?

I dread to think what percentage of crap you have that very few people still have.

I have no idea what the vinyl market is like now, but I want to punch people who make ashtrays out of records.

I say: download the iPhone app that does magic with barcodes and such. Create a list. See what happens.Then: eBay.

[reddragdiva]

"News that would have been more useful before you shipped to the UK."

Well, yes. But I hadn't realised that it would be an even worse albatross here than it was in Australia.

"Can you not play it once, rip it once and worry about cutting the files later?"

The point is that I'm observably not even doing that. It's possible there's an ideal world where I'd bother, but that I haven't bothered ripping one record in four years strongly suggests that world isn't this one.

"I dread to think what percentage of crap you have that very few people still have."

Really rather a lot. That's the library-worthy stuff. I might also have things that I don't realise are serious rarities.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, yes. But I hadn't realised that it would be an even worse albatross here than it was in Australia.

You should hasten that mid life crisis, then, and rediscover the value of it over kids and stuff. Also: sportcars.

The point is that I'm observably not even doing that.
Pay someone? Start ripping now. 1-2 per day is.... a start?

[(Anonymous)]

I have no idea what the vinyl market is like now, but I want to punch people who make ashtrays out of records.

Hear, hear. Mind you, I think I can count my 'collection' without taking my socks off, and I seem to listen to it without worrying about ripping it, so perhaps I'm not the best person to comment! :D

[baljemmett]

I have no idea what the vinyl market is like now, but I want to punch people who make ashtrays out of records.

Hear, hear. Mind you, I think I can count my 'collection' without taking my socks off, and I seem to listen to it without worrying about ripping it, so perhaps I'm not the best person to comment! :D

[Argh, forgot to sign in over this side...]

[arkady]

I say: download the iPhone app that does magic with barcodes and such.

Two problems: neither of us has an iPhone (and there's no equivalent BlackBerry app).
And most of these records do not have barcodes.

(Plus photographing all the covers would be an absolute bugger and listing them all a mammoth undertaking.)

[thefon.net]

I'm happy to lend you a barcode reader, but that won't fix the problem of records no barcodes.

Maybe just lay them out and take a photo? That's the quickest way to catalogue everything.

[arkady]

I think you're vastly underestimating how many records we're talking about here. It's just under half a ton of vinyl - literally thousands of records.

[alexmc]

I'd offer to help as I am currently working from home, and live in Leytonstone, but frankly I haven't played a record on my deck for a year or more...

vinyl (p h-r posting)

[(Anonymous)]

If it's that rare, put it on Ebay. It could be worth your time and trouble.
I would copy as much as possible first.
See if Reckless Records may want to buy them.

[allsweetnessandlight]

Offering rare stuff to a library sounds good. Otherwise I'd suggest what my mate Alan just did - sell what you can and offer the rest to friends. Obviously the first step has to be making a list of what there is.

I do wonder whether the ripping bit could be crowdsourced? Only the initial step needs to be done by someone with physical access to the disks. The rest could be done by, for example, someone who doesn't have copies but would be prepared to dissect and tag in return for getting to keep a copy.

[bohemiancoast]

What we did is sort of what you've asked for, which is that we found a friend who said 'hey, I'll rip all your vinyl in return for getting the vinyl'. Of course he didn't, in practice, rip any of the vinyl; it's probably still in one of his many storage units. But we had not played any vinyl for nearly a decade at this point. What we did do, which I would commend to you, is to make a list (in Excel) of all the vinyl, with a very quick note of whether it was available or not. I've been gradually rebuying CD/download versions of those albums in a rather desultory way ever since.

A lot more is available now than used to be of course. The other week mflow had its 'all tracks for 20p' week; I bought quite a lot of music for 20p a track, and one of the things I did was fill in very many of the remaining gaps, in consultation with S. So now I am confident that everything we ever owned on vinyl we either own now in digital form, don't care about, or will never be available. There were perhaps a dozen of that last sort. In principle I sort of wish we'd ripped them but as I still have a load of unripped concert recordings I am not sure it would ever have happened.

What I would do with your collection, which is the advice I was given but didn't take, is to take it to the second hand vinyl shop in Wood Street.

[reddragdiva]

That shop on Wood Street is frightening. It's a sea of vinyl records that no-one will ever care about. Utterly surplus atoms.

[sassbandit]

So. Later this year I will probably have a few months of not much to do. I'll be in Australia. I would like to have bits of this music that's not otherwise available (esp the mushroom/festival stuff as previously discussed). If you don't have a better plan by then, you could ship it to me to rip, then I could ship it onward to your library of choice (and send you back the digitised results). But that wouldn't be til September.

[reddragdiva]

I would strongly recommend that in the meantime you hit the mp3 blogs. Google Blogsearch, enter band and/or album name and "mp3". Quite a bit from about the '80s on is already there. ('70s, nothing.)

[sassbandit]

Part of my motive is discovery -- remember I'm enough younger than you that although I heard a lot of that stuff on the radio, I wasn't really buying stuff or aware of it enough to track it until the 90s. So it's pretty hard to google for "all that shit that was on the radio when I was a kid mp3", you know?

[reddragdiva]

This site might help. Those are hit compilations, which would be said radio stuff. Might be good for names. It's not a site to download the albums, unfortunately. And most of it is not Australian material per se. But it might be a start.

[sassbandit]

Have you seen this stuff on youtube? http://www.youtube.com/user/nzoz1987 ... there's a different username for each year so eg nzoz1983 nzoz1979 etc. That's my usual source. Amazing stuff!

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, that's basically the best possible start, just look through those ;-) Anything mainstream that's worth having will be there. For indie stuff, this is probably the best current compilation.

[reddragdiva]

World told.

[allsweetnessandlight]

I have too much time on my hands, but the logistics might be a problem.

[reddragdiva]

I expect it's a bit of a walk to E17, yes.

[allsweetnessandlight]

But I can let you know if I'm going to be in Lodnod. I do visit my sister occasionally.

[heliumbreath]

I've got a vaguely similar setup, with a USB phono preamp, and actually got one album as far as my MP3 player! The next one sent Audacity's inter-song-gap-detector into spasms and the project stalled there. But at least I've only got about a shelf-metre of vinyl of which relatively few are rarities worth the effort.