As a vinyl owner, you become unreasonably insistent about listening to albums instead of playlists and discussing "the art of album construction." Unfortunately, music streaming makes this snobbery difficult as Spotify heavily pushes playlists and lets you skip tracks with zero friction. To bring the delightful inconveniences of vinyl to the web, I built the digital turntable.
Thomas Spark's Needledrop is a version of this based on YouTube, but it was missing some of vinyl's most charming (annoying) features—like changing discs. This digital turntable has:
- Disc flipping
- Dynamic run-outs
- Track seeking with the needle
- Needle collision for flips and disc changes
- Immersive sound effects
Try the demo yourself or check out the source code to see how it works.
While I couldn't bring myself to add random vinyl crackling (just clean your records), it still replicates most of the experience.
Note: Spotify's API requires apps to be associated with an organization and have 250k monthly active users before approval for public access. The demo uses royalty-free music instead but the README has instructions for setting up your own Spotify credentials.
Credits
Inspiration & Disk CSS: Thomas Spark's Needledrop
Demo Albums:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey — Various Artists
- Tchaikovsky: The Seasons — Gregor Quendel
- 1984 Original Soundtrack — Victoria Darian & Alexei Kalinkin
SFX (via Freesound):
- Vinyl Needle Lift by Stratocube (CC0)
- Stylus by gadzooks (CC BY 4.0)
- Vinyl Runout Groove by Groschi (CC0)
- Vinyl Player by Ultra-Edward (CC0)