You can't roll a decent spliff on a CD case.

Make the effort, look them up for yourself if you need to know.

I looked into vinyl manufacture for my upcoming album and found it cost £80 for one off vinyl or £680 for 250 disks and plate master. I'm going to get a few strong dub plates made up for £15 a 4 minute side for my début song which has over ten thousand views on the tube, But I'm going to get CD's made instead for £80 for 100 disks on spindle, so I can give them away in plastic baggies, but if it costs so much to produce a vinyl disk that's why they cost at least £10-£20 for a disk! Mind you If you can shift 250 disks that is a right sum of money, but with the amount of people buying vinyl these days it would be really hard unless you are one of the bigger record companies!

I looked into cassette manufacture and that is so expensive for what it is and its like £400 for 100 cassettes without cases.

I originally wanted to do just downloads for my album but I'm now having most of my pre orders asking me to produce a physical CD, so I am and I already have enough pre orders to cover the CD manufacturing costs, another twenty pre orders and I'm getting them with a case! I've had people ask about vinyl but as I would need at least 100 pre-orders for just vinyl I'm not going to bother unless I can get more effective plays and sales!

I found a company which makes golden dub plates for £100 so I may treat my self to that if I get a couple of hundred orders! I'm surprised with the advent of CD DJ decks that Vinyl is still prevalent

Mind you if I sold 250 vinyl disks for £5 that would be £1250!!! so at £10 (which is still cheaper than standard price for a LP) I could get £2500! that's a mad overhead to sales ratio!

I know what they are , I've got huggins on Discogs right now!!?? G and VG have been Ok with everyone for decades , how should we re-draw the categories ?

Frankly, I'm not interested enough to make a suggestion. My point was that they seemed biased in favour of the vendor.

It would be worth your while shopping around. I know where i am in Glasgow you can get companies that do all sorts of things. You can get CDs made for you just like you can get books made and records made and photos printed. There will be companies that will press CDs professionally for you with a silver backing on them.

I do think in order to make money on vinyl you need to have a big label behind you thats already got orders in for singles and LPs, i think doing anything alone you're not gonna get the best prices but it can be done. I've seen HMV and Amazon sell new albums for £9.99, i've seen artist webstores selling albums at £9.99 and £12.99 so it can be done, they can sell albums at those prices and still make a profit on them. With so many pressing plants closing over the last 15 years and then the last 5 years the sales booming again and people desperately trying to find old machines from the plants they HELPED close down in the first place, it's not easy. It used to be you could have a 12" ordered on Thursday and it was pressed, returned and in the shops by Monday. It could be done instantly, now there's long waiting times. I don't know if the DJs will ever embrace vinyl again since digital has come along but I think has a lot to do with it because if you're playing chart music and you have all the big hit singles.....and those singles don't make it to vinyl for 2-3 months then by the time the record comes out there's a ton of other songs already out. I think that has a part to play in DJS not using vinyl today, there's such huge waiting times that singles just aren't viable now, they can't be released in a matter of days like they used to be which is what they need to be, they need to be in customers hands within days to cash in on it.

I do think where vinyl excels is in music where it's not really a necessity to be in the charts. There's still a lot of artists releasing singles and EPs and albums in small runs and they sell to them websites, there's some big sites out there especially here in the UK that stock everything, getting them to buy some copies off you is something to look at, there are also some massive vinyl only message boards where quite frankly, most of them are just looking for an excuse to buy records, a lot of people going on them to promote their music and if you are selling them at £10 right away that's gonna catch people's attention because it's not expensive. The other option is a website or link on your Youtube or Facebook pages, another option which used to happen up until around 2010 which doesn't really happen now is, when the DJ market did use vinyl many people would get white labels pressed up, no fancy artwork or nothing and go round the local independant stores and big stores like HMV and sell them in person at cost or very near cost, they might not have made much profit on them but it was a way to get their records in those shops and at least get people that might not know who they were a chance to listen to their music and they used to put their phone number on them and email address and website if they had one. I know it rarely happens now but getting your music in shops like that amongst other albums is a good way to get noticed. There must be other ways you can take orders. A system where if people want to buy it they can order it and then if it reaches a certain number then you go ahead and make the order for the product. You could do something like that so that you're not left out of pocket. A way you can take orders and payment details, but not take payment and then when it reaches a certain amount you can get them pressed, take payment and ship it out yourself.

That's another thing you might want to look at, some artists get their records made in one place but they get their artwork done somewhere else and then literally by hand take the record and place into the other sleeve. So many things you could do but if you're gonna do it there's some good sites to be on where thousands of people view and chat everyday, you could easily find yourself with enough orders to sell out and I don't mean any disrespect to some of them or you or your music but some people are just dying to buy records, they're dying to spend their money, they would support artists by buying their music.


As for cassettes, a good site for all things cassette, and it's all new stuff is

tapeline.info.

They do all your cases and covers and i think they even do the printing on the cassettes but they do all kinds of blank cassettes and I like the cardboard sleeves which they used to sell the cassette singles on in this country but even that will be a blank template on a computer, there will be ways you can do that at home with your own cardboard, probably an Avery template, where all the lines are marked for you to bend it cut it and glue or if you want a standard insert like they did with cassette albums in a plastic case.

They do make cassettes to suit your needs, if you only need a certain number of minutes on each side, i think the lowest is 15 minutes or if you want the tape to be a certain colour. You could easily spend less than £1 for the tape, case and insert and just copy the tapes yourself at home from CD to tape. If you don't want to do it yourself then there must be a company local to you, a printing company that does media that could easily print off cassette inserts for you. The only work you would ever need to do is sit and do the copying yourself and just spend a full day at it and then charge whatever you want for them.

theres a couple of main reasons why dj's moved from vinyl. firstly the space and weight. lugging boxes of records around isn't fun and you can't always get someone to do it for free to get in a club or get a few free drinks. secondly if you make a track you can play it instantly on digital without faffing around getting records pressed. cds were better as they were smaller and lighter and similarly you could just burn tracks at home so it was more instand, and in the dance world tracks are in and out of popularity quickly. a lot of dj's don't want to play tracks once they are too popular and played in other clubs

with a laptop you can have a crazy amount of tracks. add an external HDD and you are literally talking 8tb on a single drive. it weighs a lot less and with backups you can't lose/damage the stuff you play with

cds are nice, but most people play music without a physical media but still prefer to have a bit of plastic to hold, but i think that's slowly wearing off

I think most people when they think of a DJ they think of a skill involved, for many others pressing play on a computer does not mean you are a DJ.

I also think in late 2009 when the big labels not only stopped releasing popular music on 7" and 12" but also stopped sending out promo copies they would only supply the big DJs and radio stations with 1 track CDs with just radio edits on them.

All those other tools that many DJS used such as clean edits, dirty edits, instrumental, acapella, tv track were now all gone so even if you had a real DJ that could mix live on vinyl, they were no longer given those instrumentals and acapellas to do that with their CDJs or laptops and that's why to this day you hardly ever hear remixes, you hardly ever see white labels and for me that's taken a lot of fun out of it.

Not interested but you thought you'd post anyway? If the "buyers" and "vendors" are using the same guide where's the bias?

i think different people will think of different things. older people may think of people like tony blackburn. radio dj's to whom talking is the main point. others may think of dj's who simply play good music without mixing, such as northern soul dj's. others will think of club dj's where the mix is important, and some may think of pub/disc/meatmarket dj's where they play cheesy chart music and talk between records. each of these things typically involves a skill set. someone who is technically good at mixing may not be great at chatter and vice versa


i take it you aren't familiar with modern djing as there are plenty of sources for what is now more commonly known as "stems". one of the most popular dj software providers has software that allows dj's to live mix stems. these are pretty much mutlitracks. however some may say that is more what a producer or remixer will do, rather than a dj would do live. years ago more dj's may mix acapellas and instrumentals to make a live mix, but now they will create a mix at home and save it to play later, there's no need to do a live mashup which may go wrong, when you can premake it and ensure it's perfect. i used to do live mixing like that but now prepare at home instead. remember it's the audience that should be having fun. how the music is created and comes out is irrelevant. it's how it sounds in the end that counts. someone can be a good dj by simply playing the right music at the right time for the crowd. you can be the most technically proficient dj in the world but if you aren't playing the music the crowd likes it doesn't matter. and too many dj's forget that and fart around with scratching and stuff that doesn't add anything good and play tracks that aren't appreciated by the audience as they are trying to hard to play something cool

You've obviously not understood my post, no wonder you're "shocked!"

Because neither "good" nor "fair," is how I would judge the condition attributed to records described as thus in the detail. Because in my and many others opinions, they aren't.

Good news for those wanting to get into vinyl.

I read that Oracle are producing an "entry level" turntable for under $2,000 this year.

Cheaper than the described "affordable," Paris at £4,750.

http://www.hifinews.co.uk/news/artic...ound;4750/9334

It's a whole different world, isn't it?

The reason many of us moved into buying CDs was that vinyl was terrible back in the day. I was an avid collector of 12" singles for a while in the eighties but I found that on normal equipment they frequently jumped and warped very easily.

CDs have some exaggerated claims, such as you could spread jam on them on they would still play okay, but they were far more reliable than the vinyl copies being sold.

Good point.

You're right in that a DJ is many things to many people. They're all of those things to me.

I'll give you my take on it all. For many years I would buy music only on vinyl because of the edits on them, i did the same with cassette tapes and CDs and I still do that to this day. As a hobby, i produce music. It is not a job. I have made very few remixes in my life, I am not good at it, the most I ever do is for fun I will put acapellas on top of any tracks I make just for my own personal amusement.

Nowadays I'm lucky in that I have client accounts with the big labels, don't ask how I got them but what that does is it lets me have access to a lot of music, I can request music when I want it, near enough any instrumental I want, many acapellas that are simply not sold to the public via CD singles, not given out on promos to DJs and are not supplied to online record pools. I have most of the top 40 albums in instrumental form, the catch being most are watermarked and I couldnt share them even if I wanted to. As a DJ will tell you, you can invert them and get a pretty clean acapella out of them. The point I'm making is, before i had these client accounts and I could get entire albums worths of instrumentals and clean edits and every other version you can think of, i relied on the labels sending them out as promos and singles. A DJ promo would often be pressed at a few thousand copies, many ended up online for sale for very cheap, many ended up in high street stores like HMV and Virgin, they didn't mind that. They didn't mind that not only the big DJs, but any DJ, any member of the public had access to them if they wanted to buy them. Now I've spoken to a few people in a few labels and they've told me why not only do they not send out those tracks anymore willy nilly but they also told me why most CD promos now and online digital promos are just one track, just a basic radio edit or main edit and I don't like their excuses. I think if they really supported DJs, they would be putting all those mixes on the CDs and their online sites, they would have made all those edits available so that a wide range of DJS had access to those tracks, instead, they took them away.

I know there are sites that release the stems, I know there are sites where people trade stems and that is a much more creative way to make a mix but it's not for every song or artist, nor was all the promos in the past. What i'm saying is, for chart music, popular music, not that long ago, it was fairly easy to get different mixes for all the big singles which meant DJS, professional or amateur were able to make their mixes fairly quickly and everything they did was current. It just doesn't happen anymore. I suppose it depends what kind of music you are into but if you like chart music, it just doesn't happen anymore. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about radio shows where every remix is by DJS youve never heard of but they sound awesome, bootlegs, mixtapes, all the time with songs that are still in the charts, it just rarely happens now and if it does happen it's not because someone at home is talented and did it, it's because a big super DJ has been given the tracks and that's what sells it.

Any oppertunities for newcomers to make their own mixes has reduced dramatically because most of the songs they would want to mix they wouldnt know where to get the acapella from or it wouldnt be available to them or the same with the instrumental or the stems. I'm not say that would have been the case in 2009 either but there would have definately been more options available. Now it's very much a case of private collections and people trading and no one giving out their sources and everyone trying to one up each other and better each other whereas in the past those tracks were just given out and your talent decided if you were good or not.


So for me it's always about the different edits and unfortunately the labels just don't like giving them out freely anymore unless you have good reason for wanting them.

Because I already had a fairly good record playing system (NAD amp, Mission speakers, Dual turntable) I had to buy a separate CD player back in the 80s. I bought a well-regarded Marantz model and a few CDs and connected it up. The first thing I noticed was that none of the CDs sounded any good. Granted, there was no surface noise, no jumps or speed variation but I'd always kept my albums in good condition so it was unusual to hear any of those with vinyl.

I think what happened was that in the early days of CD, new pop and rock releases were carefully mastered to exploit the best aspects of the medium but much less care was taken over remastering older albums, so if you compared an old vinyl album with a CD reissue the vinyl sounded better. Gradually this changed until many major albums had been rereleased on CD, newly mastered and with previously unavailable bonus tracks. Now we're seeing a lot of great albums being reissued on high quality vinyl, so the wheel is coming full circle.

One of the complaints about vinyl is that some labels couldn't on occasions get the hole dead centre in a 45.
I found some "picture disc," 45s would "skate" unless the tracking force was heavier than it should be, so I avoided them.
There's always going to be a variation in the quality of records and CDs produced by different labels and different pressings from time to time.

I've only in the past couple of years started buying albums on vinyl. I'm 31, so I can remember vinyl being about initially but it was tailing off for CDs.

My reason for taking up vinyl is not to do with sound quality or it being trendy, it's more to do with me wanting to go back to enjoying the process of buying an album, appreciating the artwork and taking the time to listen to it properly.

I used iTunes for years and then moved onto Spotify. I love both and still think Spotify is the best £10 I spend a month. However, I felt that music was becoming too "throwaway". I had access to all this music that and wasn't taking the time to appreciate it. I'd download an album at a whim, listen to a few tracks and maybe not go back to it. I was just cherry picking the songs I instantly clicked with instead of appreciating the album as a whole.

I now love to go into town at the weekend into HMV, Fopp or a few indie stores and actually go back to the old process of buying music. Flicking through the shelves, holding a physical album in my hands, looking over the artwork and more importantly taking the time to make sure I am buying the right album for me as discussed, they are not cheap. Then when I get home I take time out to sit and listen to the album as a whole, waiting to turn the record over or sometimes put on the second one. All while looking at all the artwork in the cover and reading through the credits or lyrics.

Can you do all that with a CD which is probably half the price? Yes you can, but for me it's purely a personal preference. I love the process of playing the vinyl and looking at the larger artwork.

Vinyl albums are very tactile. That's why I've still got a lot of them, though most are rarely played. But I read the back covers of some from time to time. I play some occasionally just to keep my turntable from suffering from lack of use. Like many mechanical devices, apart from lubrication,"use is the best forms of preventative maintenance." But most of my favourites are now on CD or transferred to mp3.

So how would "you" judge the difference? it's not for you to "judge" anything is it? How exactly? ,would you like every record dealer on ebay to recategorize their listings to meet your own personal preference?

It's not your job to judge my opinions.


No.

I think you're getting too obsessed with my opinion... well..... on most things...

Check your history.

Don't fret. I'm sure it won't be long before somebody brings out an app which allows you to play virtual vinyl albums on virtual turntables and cartridges of your choice.

Loving the battle of "Who Knows More About Vinyl"

There is a way you can add the "track in sound," on a vinyl 45, to a digital recording.

"It's all about nostalgia."

I can experience a bit of nostalgia using digital recordings like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atNmUD-ryIE


Where did you get the idea that it's a battle?

People are making observations, there's no winners or losers.

you can already get a plugin that adds vinyl effects and has a load of options. dj software also let's you see tracks spinning around like records if you want too. it's simply to take a cd and rip it and make it sound like a record