Vinyl & Data

Time for a short, but positive post! Today I got validation that what I do is actually useful for people working with Discogs. While sharing the findings of the previous article about Czechoslovakian manufacturing date codes we were asked if we could also search for a particular misspelling in Czech releases that are impossible to find with the Discogs search functionality. Apparently the Czech alphabet has a character (ě) that looks a lot like another character (ĕ) and it is difficult for non-Czechs to spot the difference (it took me some time as well), so there was the suspicion that there would be releases where one was used instead the other, but Discogs does not allow you to search for these characters (according to one user on the Czechoslovak forum). Adding another check to my scripts was fairly trivial (I only had to take care to not search the YouTube playlists as well, which are probably not that interesting). The result: around 90 releases, the results of which hav...

Another country that put dates on its releases is Czechoslovakia (I am using past tense, as the country no longer exists). On most releases from this country from the late 1960s - early 1990s you can find a so called "manufacturing date code", or something similar to that. The page for the Opus label on Discogs says: "Most Czechoslovak vinyl records pressed between ca. 1967 and 1992 include a three-digit code on the side A center label . The first two digits represent the year, the third digit the half-year of the pressing. For example, a record with code '75 2' on the label has been manufactured in the 2nd half of 1975." and goes on to explain that this code does not necessarily mean that the record was also released in that year, but that it could have been held back for whatever reason. But it does mean that it can be used for checking the release year to see if it is perhaps wrong (too early). so I did just that. I looked at a few things in t...