The Compleat Guide to Digitizing Your LP Collection

For anyone over 40 (or maybe 30), having a music collection probably means that, in addition to racks of CDs and ridiculous piles of MP3s, you’re also sitting on bookshelves (or “borrowed” milk crates) full of vinyl LPs. Hundreds of pounds of space-consuming, damage-prone vinyl. LPs were music you could touch, with glorious full-color 12″ album art, meandering liner notes, and the practical involvement of lowering needle to plastic. Long-playing records represent an era when music was less disposable – we actually sat down to listen, rather than treating music as a backdrop to the rest of life. Dragging a rock through vinyl was not some kind of nostalgic love affair with the past – it was just the way things were. The cost of admission was pops and scratches, warped discs, having to get up in the middle of an album to flip the disc, cleaning the grooves from time to time, and getting hernias every time you moved to a new apartment.

We loved our vinyl despite and because of its warts, but we also didn’t hesitate to go digital when the time came – first with CDs, and then with MP3s and other file-based formats. We complained that CDs lacked the “warmth” of vinyl, but CD technology got better over time. We complained that the typical MP3 was encoded at bitrates too low to do justice to the music, but we learned to encode at higher resolutions, or to use uncompressed/lossless formats. Eventually, most of us gave in to temptation and started listening only (or mostly) to files stored on a computer somewhere in the house. Over time, many of us stopped listening to LPs altogether – but that doesn’t mean we got rid of them.

I personally held onto around 700 records made before the 90s, in addition to a few boxes of records my parents left in my care. Most of my CD purchases from the 90s and 00’s had been ripped long ago, but the LPs were locked in limbo – wasn’t listening to them, but couldn’t bear to let go, either. In 2011, I finally decided it was time to hunker down and digitize the stacks, to un-forget all those excellent records.

Digitizing LPs has almost nothing in common with ripping CDs. It’s a slow process, and a lot of work. But it can be incredibly rewarding, and going through the process puts you back in touch with music the way it used to be played (i.e. it’s a great nostalgia trip). In this guide, I’ll cover the process of prepping your gear, cleaning your records, and capturing as much of the essence of those old LPs as possible, so you can enjoy them in the context of your digital life.

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Humpty Hump, Beefheart, P-Funk and the Future of Criticism

Recently at Stuck Between Stations (the music writing joint I sometimes scribble for):

Roger, on the not-so-hidden connection between Ex-Republican spokes-rapper Michael Steele and Digital Underground’s funky auteur: Humpty Escapes the Tea Party Before the Martian Invasion

In 2012, neither party will be able to escape the demographic reality that the country of the future will look more like Oakland than Fairfax County. And that means that, regardless of ideology or economic philosophy, we’ll all soon be doing the Humpty Dance. Personally, I’m looking forward to finding out how Mitt Romney will deliver lines like “I’m spunky, I like my oatmeal lumpy.”

Scot, with a quick synopsis of a UC Berkeley panel on The Future of Music Journalism: Will the rise of music recommendation services like Pandora and Apple Genius affect the role of the traditional music critic?

My take is that the premise of the question is baloney. People read music journalism for a ton of reasons other than just finding recommendations. They read to try and grok the entire universe of music – to get the back-story, to trace influences, to absorb opinions, to color the landscape. Recommendations on what to buy, I expect, are pretty low on the list of reasons why people read about music.

Scot reprints an oldie but a goodie from Pagan Kennedy’s book “Platforms: The Political Pop Culture of the 70s” — Can You Get to That? The Cosmology of P-Funk.

P-Funk seemed to believe that music wasn’t so much something that you made with your instruments as it was something that you caught with them, as if funk was out there in the form of an ambient residual energy left over from the big bang. It was as if their basses and horns were finely tuned, specialized antennae dialing into cosmic leftovers. Funk became a unifying presence — the godhead as manifest to anyone willing to laugh and boogie at the same time. “One nation under a groove, gettin’ down just for the funk of it.”

Scot, on the passing of Don Van Vliet: Practice in Front of a Bush: Stuck on Beefheart

Beefheart can’t have been pleasant to work with – a musical tyrant who once threw a drummer down a flight of stairs because he couldn’t figure out what was meant by the commandment “play a strawberry” on the drums, and who gave infuriatingly vague-but-poetic directions to musicians like “Play it like a bat being dragged out of oil and it’s trying to survive, but it’s dying from asphyxiation.” Beefheart may have been an artistic tyrant, miserable to work with (unless you enjoy living on beans (laser beans)), but the amazing thing was, the tracks did sound exactly like the impossible psychedelic visions he demanded, and the world never recovered.

SoloMail, WordPress Mass Management

There are a number of plugins out there designed to scan a WordPress site on a periodic basis (e.g. nightly), grab all the recent posts, and tidy them up into an email digest. Heck, I even wrote one of my own a few years ago. Some work as WP plugins, others scrape RSS feeds.

But none of them let you hand-pick the posts you want to send by email, none of them let you “send now” and few of them provide good controls for managing the HTML/CSS of the email template. So I decided to write my own. SoloMail uses the excellent PHPMailer class, which is now included in WordPress core, and provides a simple checkbox on post views that lets you “Send now.” The current post is wrapped in a completely customizable HTML email template, and sent either to all registered users of the current site or to an external mailing list (preferred).

SoloMail is now available in the official WordPress plugin directory – get it here or see the post at Scot Hacker’s Scripts and Utilities.

To see it in action, subscribe to Birdhouse Updates.

Also: I’ve been hearing from developers who want to extend or improve the WordPress Mass Management Tools collection, so I’ve made it an open source project and posted it on github. Go for it.