Put the needle on the record put the needle on the record put the needle on the record…

Excavating the crates at my favorite vinyl emporia has left me a little light on lettuce this week, so I had to go begging to Mom when I saw this portable USB turntable on Woot. I explained how, at only fifty greenbacks, I’d be able to pay her back with the proceeds from just ten nights of deejaying. And really she’d be investing in my career. Of course she starts in immediately with the questions: What’s it do? What’s it for?

Mom, I said, it’s a turntable. You know, a record player? And she goes: You have a record player. Yeah, I know! But this one can plug into a USB port on my computer so I can convert my LPs and 45s to mp3s! I’ll be able to take my whole treasure trove of wax tracks with me wherever I go!

So then she says she thought the whole point of my vinyl fetish was that analog recordings are superior to digital recordings, and isn’t that what I’m always carrying on about?

I was like: First of all, Mom, never use the phrase “vinyl fetish” around me. I just got the most disturbing picture in my head. I’ll probably have to go into therapy for it. And second, since when do you listen to anything I have to say about collecting records? Only when you can use it against me?

The fact is, a lot of my favorite records are oddball, out-of-print albums by deservedly obscure acts from the ‘60s and ‘70s that I found at Goodwill for a quarter apiece, and they’re scratched all to Hades anyway. Or else they’re seven-inch singles from teenage punks with meager musical aptitude and even meagerer engineering budgets. There’s nothing in these records for the hi-fi devotee. They sound like crap. Digitizing them is not going to hurt.

Plus, says I, there’s a line-in jack so I can plug it into a tape deck, too, and make mp3s of all my albums on cassette. No more tedious fast-forwarding!

Well, she said, it would be nice for you to be able to get rid of all those shelves and shelves and boxes full of records and tapes.

ARE YOU KIDDING? I shouted. (I shouldn’t have shouted, but you can see how I wouldn’t have been able to help it.) NO, NO, NO, you never get rid of the original. Are you mad, woman?

Then she goes: Oh, but won’t you have to do the archiving in real time? It’ll take forever. Sure, you can download that free EZ Vinyl Converter program with Gracenote® MusicID and see how good a job it does automatically adding the album, artist, and song information—but aren’t you probably going to have to go through and painstakingly correct all that stuff by hand?

I said, I’m not going to have to. I’m going to loooove to. The idea of spending hours upon hours standardizing the genre tags and typing in artist info for track after track from stack after stack of LPs as I convert them to mp3? Momma, that’s my idea of heaven.

She looked at me, visibly confused and maybe a little disgusted at the strange, obsessive creature that her loins had brought forth. She doesn’t understand me at all. But she loaned me the Hamiltons anyway.

I love my Mom.

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