vinyl and mp3

While shopping for some christmas presents in my favourite record store (that is a real shop, not some website..) I found out that currently a lot of vinyl records come with some tokens to download the mp3s of that album. Some even include the same album as a CD (just the disk, but if you get a nice vinyl record cover plus artwork, who cares about the ugly, small plastic crap that goes as a CD cover).

I very much laudate this trend. It first started a few years ago, but seems to be standard now (at least when considering albums and not 12"es). While I have a nice and not very complex setup to rip vinyl to mp3 (basically an external USB sound device, audacity (especially the "add label track" and "export as multiple" features), manually adding track marks, and some perl scripts to rename and ID3-Tag the raw mp3s according to info gathered from freedb.org) (hm, ok, it is complex...), just entering some codes and downloading the stuff is much easier!

Thank you, record labels producing vinyl with mp3 download tokens!

Original: http://use.perl.org/~domm/journal/37980