The A Side:
Survivin’ In The 80′s (Special Version) 6:04

The B Side:
Survivin’ In The 80′s (Instrumental) 6:04

The Brief:
Well, happy birthday to the blog. Yep, one year ago, the first Fun With Vinyl blog post was put online with very little fanfare and not much notice. Since then, I have made a lot of new friends and hopefully brightened the day of people who have stumbled upon the blog and found a juicy vinyl nugget they had long been searching for.

So, how did we get here? Well, I had been experimenting with vinyl transfers since the mid 90s but, had never really nailed down the sound to my satisfaction. I love vinyl but, I simply despise the snap, crackle and pop that invade the sound on a lot of records. I was very much already into music in the 80’s when the compact disc was thrust upon the world and I immediately fell in love with the clean sound of CD. But, all of those cool (mostly 12” single) records I had been buying over the years were never going to get the CD treatment so, I continued to buy them along the way and, for the most part, kept my record collection intact and well stored with the thought always in the back of my mind “one day I’m going to be able to record these to CD”. In late 2009, I stumbled upon an online review of the ClickRepair software. I had been using an old version of DART-Pro 98 to remove surface noise but, that software seemed to dull the sound more than I cared for, it wasn’t awful but… So, I grabbed a demo copy of ClickRepair and did a comparison of the cleaned sound file against the old DART-Pro software and was very impressed with the difference and better sound quality that ClickRepair provided. I quickly went back to the ClickRepair site and purchased a fully licensed copy.

At that point, I decided the time had arrived to get serious about converting my record collection. I did research on everything from USB turntables to audiophile quality turntables to some sort of optical scanning process that would allow a computer to “play” a record that had been scanned to a digital image. I finally determined that a tried, tested and proven Technics SL-1200 turntable would be my best option so, I ordered one from KAB Electro Acoustics in Jan of 2010 and then I got to work.

The first project I embarked on was to convert all the Prince and related artists tracks that I had on vinyl but, not on CD. From that effort, came the original “Fun With Vinyl” series of tracks grouped together in loosely based themed sets that eventually reached 18 volumes. Those sets were released on the torrent site Demonoid and are still being seeded there today. I had also given the same treatment to records by other artists, recording only the tracks I didn’t have on CD and not bothering with album cuts, instrumentals, etc. The Fun With Vinyl collection series was intended to continue on with another 20-something torrents arranged alphabetically through the rest of my record collection. All of the tracks were recorded, processed and waiting to be shared.

During this time I happened upon a wonderful blog called “Burning The Ground” which featured the work of DJPaulT. I really liked what Paul was doing and decided that a better way to share my vinyl rips would be in the same fashion as Paul’s blog.

In order to do this right I determined that I was going to have to drag back out all the records I had already gone through (much to the Fun-Wife’s dismay) and complete the recording of the tracks I had left out the first time around. I also quickly decided that lifting scans of the records from Discogs and other internet sites was not going to cut it so, I went out and invested in a nice scanner for the label and cover scans. So, nearly seven months after I had started digitizing my record collection, the 12” promo of Aerosmith’s “Dude (Looks Like A Lady)” appeared as the first Fun With Vinyl blog post on June 27, 2010.

Today marks two “milestones” for the blog, it is the one year anniversary of the first post and today’s record is the 300th record to be posted to the blog (I swear, I didn’t plan it that way, just a cool coincidence). So, here’s to another year and another 300 records. Hope you all continue to visit and please tell your friends; spread the word about Fun With Vinyl and hit that Facebook Like button, I want to see that “Like” number increase, the more the merrier!

And, today we celebrate another birthday in the Prince camp as Andre Cymone turns 53. In 1981 Andre Cymone stepped away from Prince’s touring band and embarked on a solo career of his own. The first album bearing Andre’s name was 1982′s ‘Livin’ In The New Wave’ and it was followed up in 1983 with ‘Survivin’ In The 80s’. The title track from that 2nd LP was released as a single and today’s posting is the promo 12” which features an extended “Special Version” of “Survivin’ In The 80′s” backed with the Instrumental.

The Source:
Label: Columbia Records
Catalog#: 44-04958
Format: Vinyl, 12″, 33 1/3 RPM
Country: US
Released: 1983

The Equipment:
Technics SL-1200MK2 Turntable
Audio Technica AT440MLa Phono Cartridge
Yamaha RX-Z1 A/V Receiver
Sony PCM-R300 DAT Deck
Turtle Beach Catalina sound card
Mustek Scan Express A3 1200 Scanner
Spin Clean Record Washer MKII

The Software:
Cool Edit Pro
ClickRepair
dBpoweramp
Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006
Microsoft ICE

The Links:

password is funwithvinyl

Enjoy and get it on!