Before FWV became a proper blog, I embarked on a project to digitize all of the tracks I had on vinyl that I didn’t have on CD.  I didn’t originally start off recording entire records and scanning the artwork for them.  My first attempt became a collection of loosely related volumes that I called Fun With Vinyl.

A few things were happening around this time…  One, I was growing tired of the constant “work” I was doing as a mobile DJ and was looking to get out of a business I had been involved in for 20 years or so.  Two, I was realizing that I had a lot of cool music stored away in cabinets that I never got to listen to and I wanted to bring that music “back to life”. Three, I was about to have a DJ website with no DJ business to promote so, what was I going to do with my web real estate?

So, as I’ve mentioned on the blog before, after numerous experiments with converting vinyl to digital, I had settled on a method that produced the quality and results I wanted.  So, I set about working on the records.  During the time I was recording, I guess the DJ side of me wanted to share this with others.  I thought, there’s got to be other folks that remember these records and would want to hear them, too.  Since I was primarily doing Prince and related artists to start with, one of the first places I went to bring up the subject of what I was doing was the forums at prince.org.  There I was met with some skeptical derision and one person with genuine interest. That person, who to this day, I only know by his screen name, squirrelgrease, turned out to be a wonderful graphic artist.

I had made the decision to post my vinyl collections at the torrent trading site Demonoid.  I had posted two or three of the collections already when I told squirrelgrease where they were and where to get them.  He immediately contacted me after downloading them and offered to create artwork to go with the collections.  I didn’t think much of it really, at first.  But, I said sure go ahead, I’ll wait a bit before posting the next collection so it can go up with the artwork.  When I got the images from him, I nearly flipped out, the old vinyl worn images with the pinup girls totally captured the feel of the collections in my mind.  So, from that point on, as I created each collection, I sent him track listings and he put together the artwork.  We collaborated this way through 18 volumes.  Before I abandoned the format, I got the interest to put together a complete collection of all of Prince’s US commercially released 7″ singles and ‘The Virtual U.S. 7” Singles Box’ wound up rounding out the volumes at a total of 20.  The Singles Box even got a positive review as a proper bootleg release over at The Digital Garden.

After I had released several volumes of Fun With Vinyl, I decided that djrichiep.com could be a place to offer these records in addition to Demonoid.  So, that was what preceded the blog here.  As a matter of fact, you can go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and see how djrichiep.com has evolved over the years and see how these collections were listed here in 2010.

As I say, that was early 2010 when I started releasing those collections.  I have been and still am asked about those collections, where are they and how to get them to this day.  The damned things are even being SOLD by some creep at the site ioffer!  So, I have decided to bring those volumes back to djrichiep.com where they rightly belong.  When I started actually blogging, I felt that these collections were superseded by the actual 12″ posts I was doing and that interest in them would pass.  I’ve been reminded numerous times that I was wrong about that so, by semi-popular demand, these collections will now reside where they belong.

The pages that follow contain the original write-up I did at the time of each release, I tried to keep them just as they were originally…

May they continue to bring enjoyment for many years to come….