Here's some (five to be exact) interesting record collecting related articles that I've come across in the last few weeks.

• Every record collection has its roots in a moment of complicated joy. We hear a song, and it makes us happy. We want to hear it again; we want to feel the same feeling as the first time we heard it. The easy solution is to acquire a copy of the song, so we can bring back that feeling or something like that feeling whenever we want. (The feeling is never exactly the same. Sometimes it degrades, at one rate or another, over time and repeated experience. But sometimes it stays very similar.) Read the full article from Seattle Weekly.

Here are a some articles that I've recently come across involving record collecting.

1) The News Journal interviews Michael Ace, host of WVUD's "Cruisin' America," in a story called "Passion spins at 45 rpm: The soundtrack of his youth thrums a steady backbeat to Newark collector's life."

2) In an interview published back in December, Asbury Park Press talks with Garry Tallent of the E Street Band about his record collecting history and a few of his prized possessions. "I set out a long time ago to try to collect all five Buddy Holly Deccas and all five Elvis Suns. 45s. I like 78s, but they just are so breakable. I had four of 'em for the longest time and getting that last one was just hard to find." The full story is still available online here.

3) From The News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington, "Music collection connection" covers a local record collectors convention.

Today marks the 47th anniversary of [w:The Day The Music Died], when a plane crash killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper. Below are links to some related articles that were recently published:

• How Buddy lives on
• Music legend's meteoric rise ended in a frozen Iowa farm field
• Ritchie Valens lives!

• Categories for blogs and playlists (partial)
• Consider putting Membership under About
• Content for About
• Describe the organization
• Mission
• History
• Record show, radio programs, Hall of Fame
• About the site
• Membership
• Flyer for record show
• Menu item descriptions
• Alternate upload method for audio (completed)
• Users provide passwords at signup
• Add captcha
• Site Map
• Google sitemap
• Taxonomy menus
• Copyright policy
• Live, streaming audio
• Fix white space above page content; test in other browsers
• See why the registration emails end up in people's spam folders
• Web links directory
  

**This post is in-progress. I will promote it to the front page when I finish writing it.**

I thought I'd introduce the club and explain the site and its purpose.

The Birmingham Record Collectors is... (see About for now).

For years, the site simply served as a resource for information about the club and its activities, like the BRC Annual Record Collectors Show.

In January 2006, I started rebuilding/redesigning this website. My first goal was to make the site easily manageable by anybody. A few weeks later, the new site was born.

The end result is a site that serves as a resource about the organization itself AND a general resource for record collecting.

What's left on the progress of the site...

Every now and then, people ask me for help identifying the title and/or artist of a song. Typically, I search Google using lyrics from the song and look for the song or artist on All Music Guide. Recently, music identification software Tunatic was released to simplify this process. I have yet to try it, but according to user comments on digg.com, it appears to work. Tunatic can be queried by playing music through a computer microphone (or any other audio input) or by playing a digital audio file, like an MP3.

45blog.com is a site that focuses on 45 RPM recordings, providing commentary on hard-to-find records coupled with MP3 downloads. Although it appears that this website hasn't been updated in several months, it is still worth a look.