If you have a large vinyl record collection, you'd probably want to digitize it for easier access around the home & on your mp3 player etc.

You can now buy dedicated record players to help which is better than using the sound card in your PC, but it's still not ideal:

It's very slow.If your vinyl isn't in perfect condition then nor will the digitized copy (even after click/pop/scratch filtering).You won't get the extra benefits of bought digital music such as track titles, cover artwork etc.

You could just buy it all new but that would be expensive & wasteful.

You could try to find all the tracks on P2P networks but the searching alone would take ages. You could download spoilt copies (with adverts etc). You could be raided by copyright police etc and even if you still have a genuine vinyl copy, simple being on P2P networks means you're guilty of helping others steal copyrighted material.

My proposal would involve using a normal flat-bed scanner to scan part of an album. Software on the PC then extracts information that can help identify the album. E.g. by OCR of the text, capturing any barcode, or even capturing beat/tones etc from the music by analysing the groves (yes, someone has done that & released it freely!).

This ID info is then used to do a database look-up on the internet, just like CDDB, and if it finds a successful match then you are given a link to download a high quality (FLAC?) (DRM-free) digital copy. Either from the database site, or from a link to the record label's preferred digital music distributor such as iTunes (in which case some kind of free voucher code might be needed).

What do you think of this idea or comment?
(You can change your vote at any time)

I agree

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I disagree