If you haven't discovered Discogs and want to buy vinyl records: head there now. Even if they don't have something you want, you can set up a Wantlist so that when it does go on sale, you'll be notified.

As a (former) seller, I found that their database has virtually every release and every pressing of every record ever recorded. More or less. If you bought the thing in a retail channel of any sort, they've got it.

The buyers and sellers, with very few exceptions, are really nice. Altogether a great experience.

I think the author eloquently articulated the reason why I still enjoy vinyl (despite not having bought any in the past decade, I have 300 records from the preceding decades):

> In a world where the whole philosophy is based on mood swings, limited attention spans, and an expansion pack for everything; putting on a record, sitting down to do nothing else but listen to it? That’s where the real value lies.

I remember record collections - they were before my time but the older generation still had them. Music discovery was delightful, you’d comb through a stack of music and find something you’d never heard before, drop it on the record player, and listen cover to cover.

Record collections, libraries, etc. all gave me this feeling - of spontaneous, unguided, content discovery. Where you’d find little known content on the shelf right next to a household name. Nobody competing for your attention, nobody trying to “buy” their way into your attention span. You’d discover something interesting, sit down, and lose yourself in it.

It’s part of what made me build https://audile.app, I wanted to spontaneously discover music I’d never find through modern distribution channels. It’s just Math.random() on top of Deezer’s catalogue. I tried to treat Deezer as a “record collection” and spontaneously/randomly discover content in the collection in a similar way as picking a random shelf and combing through the stack of records.

I think I’m the only one using it, and it’s still missing something, but it’s the closest to scratching that itch I’ve gotten so far.

This was a neat article.

As a side note, here is a list of curiosities in optical:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_albums_with_tracks_hid...

The feel of physically manipulating vinyl is one thing I really enjoy about DJing. Gentle touches to the spinning platter and adjusting the pitch microscopic amounts to perfectly match two different records is a wonderful art.

Detroit's Underground Resistance also had a release called Hidden In Plainsight that has two "parallel" grooves, so two independent tracks on the same side.

IIRC it was an NSC thing.