Vinyl & Data

Today another data dump was released covering all releases up until (and including) December 31 2019, so I can look at some statistics again. If you don't know how this works, I would recommend reading the previous articles . Release statistics I looked at the dump file with new data entered and changes made from December 1 - December 31 2019. This dump file has 11,955,493 releases, whereas the previous one had 11,854,877. That means 100,616 releases more. Also: 11,187,982 releases stayed the same 663,648 releases were changed 103,863 releases were added 3,247 releases were removed from the database 208 releases had status Draft, Deleted or Rejected 0 releases that were not Accepted were in both dumps 3 releases were moved from Draft to Accepted Changes in the data (that is: changes to already existing releases) are distributed as follows: Existing releases changed in December 2019  What is striking is that there are significantly more edits. I looked thr...

Because a new data dump was released today I decided to look a bit further into the ISRC codes and how they are being fixed. Before you read further I would advise to read the previous blog post about this topic first. In the previous article I had the following data for the amount of releases with a (possible) ISRC code, but not using the ISRC field: May 2019 dump: 22,391 releases June 2019 dump: 21,096 releases July 2019 dump: 19,214 releases August 2019 dump: 15,161 releases September 2019 dump: 13,390 releases October 2019 dump: 12,090 releases November 2019 dump: 11,360 releases December 2019 dump: 10,578 releases In the January 2020 dump this is further down to 8,893 releases, so that's good news. I am hopeful that in the next few months that all the obvious mistakes will have been fixed (there are also a few edge cases I need to research further so I can filter them out). To catch that in bar charts: I plotted the release numbers that are in need of fixing f...

When adding a release to Discogs it is important to record as much detail as possible. This means looking at physical releases, discovering what data is there and then entering it. But it is sometimes very difficult to see what actually is on a release. A big challenge is optical media, where some data (such as SID codes ) is sometimes unreadable because it is so small. The result: people are missing information, or enter the wrong information. You basically have no other choice than to magnify. And what better tool to use than a camera? So far I have tried a few things. One thing I tried is a cheap endoscope (originally bought to see deep inside the guts of audio equipment in need of repair), but that is something I would most definitely not recommended, as it is essentially a bad webcam with ditto quality. I also looked at a USB microscope but those are either very expensive, or also webcam quality. Also, I already have a camera that gives me very good quality pictures, namely my...