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Is Dead Format coming back?


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1 hour ago, bridley said:

Can someone give me a quick rundown of what was so great about dead format? I remember being blown away at how bad it was compared to all the hype. What was  I missing? 

Nothing really this is just another VC nostalgia thread.

 

But they had a variant gallery for releases so you don't have to click each listing. That's my best guess, more pictures 

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4 hours ago, bridley said:

Can someone give me a quick rundown of what was so great about dead format? I remember being blown away at how bad it was compared to all the hype. What was  I missing? 

I don’t think you were missing much.

People enjoyed the control of listing each entry with their own syntax.

 

Artist | Album | Year | Edition | Notes

 

Etc.  It was kind of nice having designated categories – you could list out pre-orders, CDs, 7”s, prints, etc.  And I’m pretty sure you had an option to note whether an item in your collection was open to cash or trade offers.  But I think that was the extent of it.  And of course, it had its own buy / sell / trade board which was just another avenue to work out deals without paying Ebay / Discogs fees – or anything at all, if the right kind of trade was worked out.

 

Discogs for details and data.  Dead Format for customization.  But it’s barely customization, which is why I’m hoping they’ve been working on this relaunch for a while now, and will roll out new features instead of just resuscitating what we all had a decade ago.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 9/1/2020 at 8:25 AM, Derek™ said:

It’d be fun to design something for public use that’s a little less manual.  The one I use has hidden fields that log and tally unique releases vs. variants, pre-orders, and stuff in transit.  I also use a PS macro to make instant icons of the album art.  It works for me but it requires upkeep, and it’s not without its faults. 

 

I think if DF doesn’t offer enough (clean) customization, I’d be interested in creating something slick for wide use.  Preferably with a darker, suave aesthetic.  I don’t believe I’ve seen that on any vinyl collection site. 

So 3 weeks later and I actually started doing something about this.  It's still in the tinkering stage but I'm open to suggestions, especially this early on.  The thumbnails are manually added and will make the doc take ages to add rows, if you have 800+ of them.  I'm thinking of a way to compress them into a static gif, or just modifying the design to not use them at all.  It'll be a dream machine for anyone with a modest collection.  Open to suggestions.  If anyone has a genius way of fetching Discogs sale values, please let me know.  Right now it's entirely manual and such a pain.  More to follow.

 

Messages-Image-1702721908.png

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7 hours ago, Derek™ said:

So 3 weeks later and I actually started doing something about this.  It's still in the tinkering stage but I'm open to suggestions, especially this early on.  The thumbnails are manually added and will make the doc take ages to add rows, if you have 800+ of them.  I'm thinking of a way to compress them into a static gif, or just modifying the design to not use them at all.  It'll be a dream machine for anyone with a modest collection.  Open to suggestions.  If anyone has a genius way of fetching Discogs sale values, please let me know.  Right now it's entirely manual and such a pain.  More to follow.

Hmm... that is really weird they have nothing in their API about the prices of records. GET /releases/{release_id}{?curr_abbr} returns the lowest value with a ton of other data on the release, and another that returns lowest price in the marketplace section. Honestly, depending on the backend language you're using you might cheat and just do a curl and then cancel as soon as the first resource comes over, which seems to be the rendered HTML page. I.E. curl https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/{release} From there just parse out the values.

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14 hours ago, MCDELTAT said:

Hmm... that is really weird they have nothing in their API about the prices of records. GET /releases/{release_id}{?curr_abbr} returns the lowest value with a ton of other data on the release, and another that returns lowest price in the marketplace section. Honestly, depending on the backend language you're using you might cheat and just do a curl and then cancel as soon as the first resource comes over, which seems to be the rendered HTML page. I.E. curl https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/{release} From there just parse out the values.

I'm too dumb for [most] of that – making things look crisp is more my territory.  If it's not too extensive or time-consuming on your end, would you mind taking a stab at collaborating with that piece, if it's even possible?  If this somehow goes anywhere I'd be sure to credit your efforts.  And if not, no worries.

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I joined DF, VC, and Discogs all in 2010. Wild ride, these past ten years.

I loved DF for the community. It felt as if everyone was older (as I was 29/30 then, it seemed like most people were around my age, had kids, careers, etc). It's not entirely accurate, of course; there were younger folk using the boards actively. But VC felt very young in comparison. I made a few real/fake internet friends via DF. Actually, I did meet a couple people via DF in real life, too. I also grew my collection a good bit because of buying/trading, and it was another outlet to sell. It was a great community.

I had my +/- 1,300 record collection customized on there. It always loaded easily on one FUCKING page on my phone (unlike having to scroll through a max of 250 items per page on Discogs). I could easily check my collection or want list. It was great. But then I didn't save it. So I have no recollection of what was or wasn't there. I've added about 500 items on to Discogs but the task is daunting and I'm lazy or preoccupied. 

I won't add my stuff back there because at this point Discogs is the standard. But it would be great to have another board to check when I'm ... bored.

Edited by somethingvinyl
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I reluctantly switched to Discogs after Deadformat shut down.  I liked the simplicity of Deadformat and the ability to make my own tradelist, and I hated the appearance and "rules" on Discogs.  Since then however, I've grown accustomed to it and will probably just stick with Discogs even if DF comes back.

 

edit: and yes, I know I never removed my DF tradelist link from my sig.  It's nostalgic....

Edited by kyacrash
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On 9/25/2020 at 4:03 PM, Derek™ said:

So 3 weeks later and I actually started doing something about this.  It's still in the tinkering stage but I'm open to suggestions, especially this early on.  The thumbnails are manually added and will make the doc take ages to add rows, if you have 800+ of them.  I'm thinking of a way to compress them into a static gif, or just modifying the design to not use them at all.  It'll be a dream machine for anyone with a modest collection.  Open to suggestions.  If anyone has a genius way of fetching Discogs sale values, please let me know.  Right now it's entirely manual and such a pain.  More to follow.

 

Messages-Image-1702721908.png

This looks nice, but it's really just a spreadsheet in disguise?? Nicely.done! I could possibly turn this into am Android app, but at the rate of my other coding projects it wouldn't be done for let's say a year or so lol. Too much on my plate these days

Edited by V3XED
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1 hour ago, V3XED said:

This looks nice, but it's really just a spreadsheet in disguise?? Nicely.done! I could possibly turn this into am Android app, but at the rate of my other coding projects it wouldn't be done for let's say a year or so lol. Too much on my plate these days

Yeah, just a basic Google Doc at the moment.  (Thank you.)  The thumbnails are copy-pasted from a template in Photoshop to ensure there's uniform design across the album art – slightly rounded corners, a pop border, and some depth to ensure dominantly white [bright] album art will have some dimension and not look tacky.  I'm shifting away from the art though, because it's just not sustainable with bigger collections, unless I find a way to drastically shrink the filesizes.

 

Anyways, let's never say never.  Not an Android guy myself but I'd like to see a "dark" project like this go somewhere for broader use down the road.  I'm really interested to see what Dead Format may be bringing to the table, when and if it opens back up.

Edited by Derek™
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  • 3 months later...
On 9/26/2020 at 12:37 PM, Derek™ said:

I'm too dumb for [most] of that – making things look crisp is more my territory.  If it's not too extensive or time-consuming on your end, would you mind taking a stab at collaborating with that piece, if it's even possible?  If this somehow goes anywhere I'd be sure to credit your efforts.  And if not, no worries.

I have been working on Other Supply on and off the last few years. Trying to figure out a way to bring all these things together. The DB from discogs is hard to compete with and as other have said, they're marketplace api isn't great unless you're a seller.

 

Having said that, I'm pretty far along on a new web app that connects to discogs with OAuth and allows you load in your wantlist and set alerts on specific records you're looking for. I'm also working in the Ebay API. I would have to get access to indie retailers but that doesn't work. I had amazon results piping in but it took it out because it's amazon. I'd rather make something that supports smaller labels/store. The problem is I'm sure my discogs API keys will be revoked once I publish this app. With previous versions of Other Supply, I scraped a bunch of sites and dumped them into my database and made it searchable but it was way too expensive to do it effectively.

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  • 11 months later...

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