I wrote a bit recently about why I still collect music on CDs. Here are my 3 reasons, which echo a lot of the comments:
1. To Support the Artist, 2. To Own the Music, 3. To Collect Artifacts (which is fun)
I also found a few recent attempts at creating new physical music formats, but most of them require Internet connectivity and are essentially cloud services that have physical access tokens :( I ended up just lamenting that we never got the Sony MiniDisc revolution that we all deserved.
I like that you mention “collecting artifacts.“ I have a pretty extensive video game OST vinyl collection. The first thing I do when one comes in the mail is open it up, deep clean the record, drop it on the record player, and spin it. But while it’s playing, I actually have the audio routed through a recorder capturing it as 96kHz/24bit wav.
I have so far archived every video game vinyl I have and I’ve slowly doing the rest of my vinyl collection. It’s been a really fun project, and like you said with “artifacts,“ I feel like I’ve got my own little museum of sorts going on. Plus it’s fun to cut them into sides (not tracks), compress into 48kHz wav, FLAC, and mp3, add the album art, and get them on my phone and home server. So I basically can take my vinyl anywhere I go!
Is it the most practical exercise? Of course not. But it’s really fun in its own way. I just like archive diving a lot given my history background, so making my own archive scratches a similar itch I guess.
I’ve been thinking of doing something myself. Any tips on the recording end of things? Is routing to a laptop good enough? Do computers even have stereo line in anymore …
I use a zoom h6n - which records to an SD card - so I can separate the stereo left and right into their own mono recordings then recombine on the back end (this allows me to use the XLR ports instead of 1/8” stereo port for better fidelity). This isn’t strictly necessary, just make sure you’re getting the stereo audio and not combining it into a mono track (unless of course it’s not stereo vinyl).
A computer is totally fine. You should be able to do it through the headphone port if you have one (I’d be surprised if you didn’t). It just all depends on what output options your turntable has. My technics 1200 mk II are RCA out so I go turntable -> left RCA right RCA adapted to their own XLR -> zoom h6.
> I ended up just lamenting that we never got the Sony MiniDisc revolution that we all deserved.
I recently got "into" MiniDisc myself. I completely skipped that format back in the day, but noticed some artists i liked were releasing albums on MD (through Bandcamp). I had also watched some YT videos on the format, and thought "why not". So I bought a portable player and a deck for at home.
It's a really cool format. I can buy releases from artists i like, or use NetMD to "burn" them myself. I have a small collection of MD's now, and i do enjoy playing that more than just pressing play on some Spotify playlist.
Also read your blogpost. MD does tick most of the "ideal format" boxes, except for "easy to reproduce". If you use an existing MD as a source to create a new MD, the lossy compression will not allow a 1:1 copy.
There's a small but fairly active community around minidisc.wiki, and some developers reverse engineering the netMD protocol and the firmware on the players. They already have some modern NetMD clients right now, making it a breeze to use the format.
1. To Support the Artist, 2. To Own the Music, 3. To Collect Artifacts (which is fun)
I also found a few recent attempts at creating new physical music formats, but most of them require Internet connectivity and are essentially cloud services that have physical access tokens :( I ended up just lamenting that we never got the Sony MiniDisc revolution that we all deserved.
The post is here: https://www.matthewhowell.net/notes/2022/on-collecting-music...