The Vinyl Projekt

If you're under 20 years of age, and heaven forbid you get dragged to a swap meet by one of your apparently clueless, nostalgia-obsessed parents, you're bound to see a lot of ratty cardboard boxes, and sometimes plastic milk crates, scattered amongst the sad and sun-faded framed family photos, Big Wheels with missing seats and chipped lead-glass ashtrays. These boxes will often have a youngish hipster in torn jeans, worn black Chucks and a well-washed Pennywise t-shirt painfully hunched over them, eyes darting left and right to ward off any interlopers as they peruse the rare bounty within.

The thin, colorful alien artifacts in these boxes, so prized and sought after by bargain hunters, disgruntled audiophiles and well, just plain crazy people, are in fact vinyl records. And before the advent of the MP3 file and the iPod, before the near prehistoric CD format and even before the completely deceased cassette tape, records were the only delivery system for purchased music throughout the world.

My own history with the vinyl record began - well, I'm not going to tell you when because then you'd have to classify me as an old nostalgia-obsessed parent or a crazy disgruntled audiophile or maybe even both - so I'll just say it involved my father's enrollment in Columbia Record Club (12 albums for a penny!) and choosing albums from Elton John (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road), The Who (Tommy) and KISS (KISS Alive II) from the catalog, and waiting not so patiently for them to arrive in the mail so we could wear them out on our trusty B•I•C turntable.

I was by no means very knowledgeable musically and by high school pretty much all I had was the entire Led Zeppelin catalog on vinyl. All that was about to change though my first year in college - my roommate had a massive music collection and I was about to catch the bug bigtime.

Fast forward to today. My record collection has grown to a modest size by some standards, ridiculously large by others. I've been hauling this stuff around, from place to place, and its been easily over a decade since any of it has seen daylight on a record player. I've decided that's about to change.

No, I'm not determined to hook the turntable up to the surround sound system in the living room and go all analog crazy. Our listening habits have changed so much: When CDs came out suddenly fussing with records was way too much trouble - and it was! Then, even more quickly, now audio files and computers have made dealing with a CD seem inconvenient and slow.

For some time now I've thought about recording all my vinyl into the computer, but have been put off by the enormity of the task. I have over 800 records - granted most of them are 12" singles, not LP's - but still, everything has to be recorded into .aiff format (CD quality audio) in real time (no ripping a full CD in a minute or two like with iTunes). The individual tracks must then be manually identified, separated and named using the waveform, filters run if the audio isn't so hot (as with some older records or if the record is scratchy) and finally saved to a backup drive before importing them into iTunes as MP3 or AAC files for listening.

I'm calling it The Vinyl Projekt - and it has officially begun as of a couple weeks ago. It's going to take a long time but the rewards are there too. Not only will I get to hear a lot of stuff that's been buried in my collection, unheard for years - and a lot of it not ever available on CD, but I'll also be experiencing the one thing that has elevated the 12" vinyl record above every other retail music format: The cover artwork!

As I work my way through my record shelves I'll scan and/or photograph record sleeves I find particularly cool, and periodically post them here. Stay tuned!