Albums

Yes I’m talking about vinyl records. I was able to take a little bit of time to convert a few albums over to digital. I have a USB turntable and I think it is the best thing since sliced bread. I can’t tell you how many albums I have tried to look for in CDs. They are just out of print and so I use to have to tape to a cassette then hook that up to my computer, but the sound quality was not up to par. Now I can just record directly to the computer and I have a program that will slice the songs individually so I can burn to them to CD. I do miss the albums a lot; I have seen some artists are starting to put out albums again.

The artwork on albums is just a missing thing of the past now. Some good ones were The Rolling Stones, Rush, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper and Stevie Vai to name a few. It seems for some artist all we are getting are downloads and can’t even get a CD with artwork. I use to love to look at the album cover the inside if it was a gatefold and the sleeve. I would just memorize everything on the album. Now a days the CD covers and insides are just not the same. Something I would like to see come back such as the albums I even like that sound of the needle on the vinyl. I’m glad that now I can take the music and convert it to digital to make it easier to carry around and put on an mp3 player. They have made it so much easier with the USB turntable and the plus with the turntable is that it can also be used on any stereo system also. So it is like having 2 in one.

One album that was very cleverly done is the Led Zeppelin In Through the Out Door Album came in a very plain brown cover which looked like a grocery bag. Once you took that off there was a scene which looked like it was a bar setting which is in sepia tones and one area color comes through. Also not too many people are aware the most inner sleeve which has a picture on both sides done in dots, if you get a damp cloth and go over the picture those dots are ink and you then have a colored picture. Very clever I had no idea about that for years. I was playing a music trivia game years back and learned about the inner sleeve changing color. I also learned later that they made about 5 or 6 versions of the album cover under the brown wrapper. Here is an example of the outside bag and one of the covers below.