Salutations™!!
I have been talking a lot about vinyl and the joys of collecting that The BCPF and I have been into. We really, really are into that and we’ve amassed a lot of $1 albums. We have a lot of the others, too, but it’s easy to get the $1 ones. Our collection has grown. Thank you Underdog Records!
But, I’ll admit that I am constantly paranoid that something will happen, some disaster or other badness and I’ll lose what I have. Not only with vinyl, but the films, DVD/Blu-Ray, CDs and The BCPF’s book collection. I have dealt with some cataloging software in the past and still have access, I believe, to the DVD/Blu-Ray/CD stuff that I put in a few years back. But, when it comes to vinyl, I have to say that I love Discogs.
Discogs is another site/service that I taut on the Sunday blogs. And, let me be clear, I am not paid or endorsed in anyway from Discogs. This is not an advertisement, just me telling my joys and love for a service that is more than just a cataloging platform. It’s, in a way, a social network and marketplace, as well. It’s easy to use and for the most part you’ll always find what you have on there. Or, what you want.
What I mean by that is, there’s a marketplace where you can buy or sell the records you want or are looking to unload. It’s no eBay or Craig’s List, but it’s easy to do. It’s easy to do if you’re able to let stuff go. I’m not able to, so I don’t know how much selling I could do on there. I’d buy, though.
Back to the disaster thing. If that disaster happens, I can easily show insurance or whomever what was in my collection, Discogs dives you an approximate value for your collection (minimum, median and maximum values based on its own market numbers) to help the appraisers in their work.
Another feature that Discogs has is it’s randomizing capabilities. If you have 20 records, that’s one thing. You have 100 records or more, then you have a lot to go through. If you’re OCD like The BCPF and me and have to have everything in alphabetical order, then the random grab method is moot. You can hit random on the app and it will randomly pick an album. Don’t like that? Hit it again. It’s just a cool feature. Oh, and it’s on app on your smart phone and on your interwebs, as well. There are advantages of each.
The last part I want to talk about Discogs’ features is the friends list. Right now, I only have two people on my friends list. Each of them, or anyone who allows me to know their user name, I can see their collection. I’ll say that one of them is Clay Howard. I have bartered a trade of started a conversation about purchasing some of his collection (he has multiples of some titles) because I can go on and see what he has. Same with him on my end. That’s where the social aspect comes in.
So, yeah, again, I’m not paid by Discogs to talk about them, I just love the service and get a lot of mileage from it. Especially when The BCPF and I are in buying mode and we can’t figure out which ones we have, especially in a serial collection like Chicago’s discography. It’s just good, clean fun. It also does CDs, but I don’t want to mix my mediums on that list. If you’re a collector of either vinyl or CDs, Discogs is my recommendation for archiving, sharing and enjoying them.
Until tomorrow, happy spinning…
Scorp out!
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“The discogs.com domain name was registered on 30 August 2000, and Discogs itself was launched in November 2000 by programmer, DJ, and music fan Kevin Lewandowski originally as a database of electronic music.” – Wikipedia page for Discogs
