vinyl.log

And just like that, a month’s sabbatical comes to an end. I considered staying away from the computer and focusing on non-tech-related hobbies, yet I ended up spending a significant amount of time adding features and easter eggs to fnhipster.com, all in spurts of time allowed by my three-year-old.

What started as a simple goal—catalog the vinyl I own —predictably spiraled into the developer’s curse of wiring up APIs and personal software. First came a macOS menu bar app to report what’s spinning (both literally from the turntable and digitally from Apple Music).

Then, a Cloudflare Worker receives those updates and displays them on the site.

And finally, the catalog itself : another Worker with cache glued to the Discogs API.

But that wasn’t even the hard part.

The challenge was determining which specific version each album was. You see, Discogs has a comprehensive database, but an album’s catalog number doesn’t make it unique. There are countless variations. Some come down to how a back cover was printed, the pressing plant, even the runout groove etchings. Each variation gets its own entry.

I’m confident I got about a 90% success rate in matching each vinyl to the right release. Now, a QA I’m actually looking forward to: validating the entries as I listen to each album over time.

Open Vinyl Catalog