#recordstoreday

Fri 15 April 2016 by Jim Purbrick

StoryBirdAlbum

3 weeks ago I spent a few hours with photoshop working on the Story Bird logo that Linda made a while ago to make it suitable for print. 2 weeks ago I spent a few hours researching the best way to convert the 24 bit 48 Khz Story Bird mixes to 16 bit 44.1 Khz audio files that could be burned to CD. A week ago I went to Maplins in Tottenham Court Road, bought a cake of printable CD-Rs, dusted off my old MacBook Pro and spent the weekend burning copies of the Story Bird album. Tomorrow the CDs will go on sale at The Marwood Coffee Shop in Brighton for #recordstoreday.

The whole process felt fun, quaint, cute, anachronistic, nostalgic, and absurd. The last time I burned CDs was 3 years ago, when I made a few copies of the 100 Robots Sustain album for friends. My current MacBook Pro doesn’t have an optical drive, let alone a CD writer. The CD player in our living room doesn’t work. I ripped our CD collection to MP3 a decade ago when we still lived in Nottingham and needed to make space for our new family. Until I tested the Story Bird CDs, the last 2 operational CD players in our house haven’t played a CD in months. It’s great to see real, physical copies of the album I’ve spent the last 6 months working on, the CDs sound great and the unique hand printed covers look amazing, but as with the piles of vinyl records sold tomorrow on #recordstoreday they will mostly serve as limited edition souvenirs.

#recordstoreday promotes collecting records just as the #comicbookday that inspired it promotes collecting comics. Fetishising obsolete formats is harmless fun, but discovering new music and supporting musicians is important. On the 23rd of April, once you’ve filed away the limited edition vinyl you queued overnight to buy on #recordstoreday, spend some time in the comfort of your own home downloading some amazing music on #bandcampday.


#bandcampday

Sat 26 March 2016 by Jim Purbrick

Black barn mixing desk

I love record shops. Whenever I had pocket money it would go on Metallica and Nirvana CDs bought from Our Price or black t-shirts to match. When I lived in Nottingham I bought Boards Of Canada CDs from the same Selectadisc that my Dad bought a rare Fairport Convention single …

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Parse By The Sea

Sat 19 October 2013 by Jim Purbrick

#parsebythesea

A few weeks ago Facebook London hosted the Parse By The Sea hackathon at the Brighton Dome as part of the Brighton Digital Festival. The idea was to take one of our internal hackathons on the road and invite members of the public to join us, turning a hackathon in …

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Facebook Hackathons

Mon 16 September 2013 by Jim Purbrick

I’ve been a big fan of hackathons since one of the first Yahoo! Hack Days I attended at Alexandra Palace was struck by lightning. The lightning caused the fire alarms to go off which opened the roof to let the torrential rain pour on to hundreds of geeks and …

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Brighton Digital Festival

Wed 04 September 2013 by Jim Purbrick

The Brighton Digital Festival starts this week and I’m very happy to be helping out with Facebook London‘s contributions: Parse By The Sea, a mobile app Hackathon featuring Parse on the 26th of September, and helping to Connect The Brighton Digital Festival by sponsoring Metranet to provide high …

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