# Memories of vinyl

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2004-08-23T09:17:02Z


test press of Communicate with notes from MarkI've been thinking about audio files lately. There are lots of interesting audio blogs these days and I realized that putting audio interviews for my sharing economy research online would be a neat thing to do. For the last month or so, I've been diving into audio gear and software. (I'll write about all this in another post when I figure out what I'm doing.) During this journey into gadgets past, I stumbled into my vinyl records from my DJ days. Most are promotional records that Rockpool sent me when I was reporting my charts to them, but many were from Mark Stephens. Mark Stephens was my mentor and one of my best friends. He was also the first person I knew who died of AIDS. Mark received tons of promos and he would share some of the good stuff with me. He would jot things down on the record jackets or on little post-its. Since I stopped spinning records, I've allowed several DJs as well as my second-cousin Cornelius to go through my record collection and take what they wanted. What I have now is a 1000+ record collection, almost all from 1988-1990, 90% crap, with very high sentimental value. What do I do with them? I looked into software to convert vinyl to mp3's but it looked like a real pain. The other idea I had was browse my vinyl for stuff I liked, scan the notes and try to find the music on a file sharing network. I should know the answer to this question, but is this illegal?

I seem to be getting into these diary-like entries these days, but digging through old vinyl and reading the little notes from Mark brought back a lot of memories. I'm struggling with how to bring some of those memories into the medium I have today.





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#### Categories

Joi's Diary, Music