How To Catalog Your Vinyl Collection

If you love vintage, chances are you have a record collection, am I right?? If you have an extensive vinyl collection, it can be hard to keep track of what you have.

A fraction of our records, all spread out 2 years ago when Andy moved in after our wedding

A backstory: years before I met him, Andy lived in a house with an extra apartment upstairs. He and his roommates used the extra space for a recording studio and Andy stored his records in the kitchen cabinets. Unfortunately, the cabinets weren't strong enough to hold the weight of the records and they eventually fell off the wall. Andy lost the majority of his record collection in that accident and since then, he has had a hard time remembering what records he currently owns.

For part of his anniversary gift, I decided to catalog his collection so he would always know what he owns! I did a bit of research and discovered Discogs.com, a site that allows you to keep track of all music you own (vinyl, CDs, cassettes, etc) and even syncs to an app called Crate Digger. Find out more below!

Start by creating a free account on Discogs.com. People can see your collections, so if you want to remain anonymous, don't choose a username that is associated with you. Andy is a turntablist and goes by DJ Fat Andy, so I created "djfatandy" as his username.

There is an option for barcode scanning to add to your collection, but the majority of our vintage vinyl isn't going to have a barcode, unless you're a big 80s and 90s fan! The easiest way to input your records is to input the catalog code you find on the record jacket or actually on the record label.

I love Jim Croce and my obsession has resurfaced as I'm reading his biography (more on that later!), so let's take a Jim Croce record as an example.


On the label on the record, you will see a code that is made up of letters and numbers that represent the edition of the album. This number is what you can search for on Discogs.com to find the exact edition you have.


Once you search and find your edition, click on it:


A page will open with ALL the information about the album. Now that you've clicked through to your edition, you can add it to your collection:


Before I realized you had to click ALL the way through to your exact edition, I couldn't figure out why I couldn't add a record to the collection. Make sure you search the album, then click your edition, then add to collection!

Once you've added all your records to your collection, you can download Crate Digger for the iPhone. You don't have to log into Crate Digger with your Discogs.com username and password--all you have to do is navigate to "Collections" and type in your username. Your entire collection loads to your phone so you can browse!

You can even create a "wantlist" on Discogs.com and keep that loaded into Crate Digger! Andy had the great idea of consulting charts/lists of the top records to add to a wantlist. Discogs.com even lets you buy and sell vinyl! I'm really pleased with the site and app and I think it will work pretty well for Andy to consult to see what he does and doesn't have.

If you're wondering if it's a time-consuming process, I will let you know that it took me about 6 hours to process his 434 records. Luckily, there was a night where he was away for HOURS (DJing Promocalypse, the Nashville "zombie prom") and I got them all done in one night. It was quite a project, but so worth it for his reaction when I showed him his record collection on my iPhone! :)

Good luck! Let me know if you decide to set up a Discogs.com account!

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