Vinyl
I own a fair amount of vinyl and I enjoy buying both old and new, however I am not a record collector. I buy things I intend to listen to so I actually play them. I store my records upright, at least; but not in a hermetically sealed bank vault or anything similar.
There are a few albums that I've sought out specifically on vinyl because I felt that the sound of the album was more suited to the medium (Faith and Disintegration by the Cure; AFI's Shut your mouth and open your eyes spring to mind). However, most of my collection is either modern singles (where they are priced much more sensibly than CDs: there was a time in 2006-2007 when you could quite regularly pick up a 7" single for 99p. Unfortuntely that period seems to have gone away) or old things I was interested in hearing.
A relatively out-of-date catalogue of my stuff (with highlights).
Listening Online
My last 10 tracks
I have a last.fm page, which keeps track of some of the things I have listened to recently on the computer, either at home or at work.
Hardware
portables
I use an iriver H140 ipod-clone. I originally bought this for a few features it has above and beyond the ipod:
- ogg vorbis support
- an FM tuner
- dictaphone recording
- works as a USB mass storage device
One major disadvantage the HP140 has over an Ipod is the physical interface is crap.
I used to own and love a minidisc player.
Firmware
I thoroughly recommend the rockbox open source firmware for the iriver. It is infinitely better than the official firmware. In fact, if I were making a jukebox purchasing decision today, I would consider an ipod, as (since January 2006) rockbox on the ipod can play sound and vorbis etc.
The Cure
There are a lot of cure bootlegs, and a lot of interesting cure stuff to collect on them. Stiff as toys and tall as men has a very comprehensive bootleg database.
unanswered questions
There's a version of the Cure's All Cats are Grey floating around on bootlegs that has a string introduction. I've never found the full song (just the string intro) and never in a good quality. Does anyone know the story behind it?
Nine Inch Nails
Ringtones
I've knocked together some apple iphone-format ringtones:
demon seed
These ringtones are derived from the multitrack sources for "Demon Seed", the final song from the Nine Inch Nails album "The Slip".
They are released under a Creative Commons attribution-sharealike-noncommercial license, as is the track they are derived from.
Get the full track (and the full album) from http://theslip.nin.com/.
others
I use an excerpt of the instrumental version of "March of the Pigs" for my SMS-alert tone: motp chime.wav.
We're In This Together 2008
This is an attempt to put together my favourite edit of We're In This Together. Featuring some of the edits from the radio edit release, but not losing the extended guitar solo no piano outro, and extending the outro with some of the piano arrangements that were featured when the song was played live during the 2007 tour.
Free Music
My guide to free music available online.