Hi all,

I'm probably asking a dumb question today, but every time I'm going bargain-shopping for new wax I've been asking myself if there's a way of knowing what kind of genre/sound are the tracks on the vinyl without listening to it.

Let me explain: many shops don't have a listening system so you basically have to buy them blinded and listen at home to something you may not like and you just bought for the fancy cover (and regret having spent your hard earned money... ). My question is: is there any iPhone app, website, idea or general clue from the disc that can let you know what you're buying? The old way of doing it is searching on youtube/soundcloud to preview it but it's too time consuming to do on a large number of vinyls.

Hope somebody can help me

Peace!

 

In theory you could scan the disc with your iPhone camera to determine or rather *guess* the genre based on average volume - depth of those grooves. In practice however, it'd be useless.
Maybe better idea is to get one of the portable vinyl players with foldable arm and convince shopkeeper that you want to listen to it.

 

Send me a photo of the vinyl's grooves and I'll do a quick mock-up of the track in Ableton Live

 

that's another thing about vinyl, it usually had probably 50% "filler" tracks that you had to buy to get the songs
you really wanted, only a few "albums" were good all the way through

when there used to be "record" stores, some of them even had a listening room for their discriminating customers

so Andrew's gadget is about as good as it will get for you, hardly a solution to carry that around eh?

next best is 2 trips, buy the stuff you are sure of, and make note of the other stuff you find interesting, which
you can take a photo of the covers, and listen online if you can find it

or you can just buy all of my carefully selected vinyl !!