Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Total Groove Length - Fun facts to know and tell

According to Wikipedia under "LP Album":

"The average LP had about 1,600 feet of groove on each side, or about a third of a mile. The needle travels approximately 1 mph on average. It travels fastest on the outside edge, unlike CDs, which change their speed of rotation to provide constant linear velocity. (Also, CDs play from the inner radius outward, the reverse of phonograph records.)"

My current estimate is 5 albums per liner inch of shelf space and thus I have approximately 405 albums (81 inches * 5 per inch) converted so far. At 3200 groove feet per album, that means 1,296,000 feet of groove. That divided by 5280 feet/mile means I've tracked about 245 miles of groove thus far on my LP conversion effort. This doesn't take into account the miles of cassette tape that I've converted but I'm guessing that out of the roughly 1000 albums loaded in my iTunes that 100 to 200 are from tape and somewhere around 400 are from CD to get to the remaining 400 that are from LP.

Since I know from the above citation that the needle travels at approximately 1 mile per hour, I should be able to check my estimates by figuring that 245 miles of groove will equate to about 245 hours of play or just over 10 days. I believe that iTunes says that I have about 35 days of music and if 40% of it is from LP, that would mean 336 albums. That tells me that I've probably got at least 20% slop in my estimates.

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