As part of my winter project to cull/digitize our combined vinyl collection, I’m now handling records I’ve not touched since we moved here 25+ years ago. I’ve learned quite a bit via my experiments and will likely document them here.
It would be crazy-making to digitize everything or to meticulously categorize the records ahead of digitizing. Also, this is meant to be a fun little project not a crazy-making one. So I’m sweeping through our records in waves.
Here’s the first pass:
Take a handful of albums from the shelf.
For each album:
Is it Liz’s? Her albums go to the right of the shelf. She’ll review them and let me know if she wants them digitized or donated. If it’s not Liz’s, it’s mine.
I can usually tell right away if the record is one I want to get rid of: I may have a CD of it already or I’m just not interested in it anymore. Into the donate box it goes.
If there’s the least glimmer of interest — I may just want to listen to the record out of curiosity — I put the record back on the shelf (lean it away from Liz’s records!)
My goal is to record one album a day, edit the recording, import it into iTunes, and then put the album in the donate box. I’m not interested at this point in keeping any albums as artifacts, or maybe a few: the Sgt. Pepper’s album and Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief (more on Matching Tie) come to mind.
After I put an album in the donate box, I pick the first one on my side of the shelf and put it on top of the turntable lid. That’s the next one I work with.
And then, yes, another process kicks in. More on that later.
