Month: January 2026

About Month: January 2026

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Late January 2026: Behind the scenes organizing and mail. So much mail. Sale List!

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

Dollar Country studios is slowly getting cleaned up. This week I opened mail. A couple years ago I had the bright idea to assign a Source Number to every discogs or ebay user that I bought something from so I could have that history with the disc itself in the archive. That made opening mail a longer process than it used to be and so I often put it off until there’s a critical mass of boxes that I need to take of. So that’s what the picture up top is. At least I’ll never run out of 45 mailers!

LP Logging
Back in the newborn times of early 2024 I had a lot of time in the middle of the night when I had to be up with the newborn but he mostly slept. So I went through every box of 45s I had and logged them all on a private discogs account. This filled my time but it was also practical. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve bought a record online that I had already bought without remembering. So now I can check and see if I already have something.

Approximate amount of 45s left to add to the archive: 9803

Well I logged (most of) the 45s in 2024 but the LPs I had were still a mess. I had logged some of them but it was sporadic and not uniform in any way. Starting last week I got to work and started logging the LP shelves. I’ve logged about 1600, which seems tiny in comparison to the 45s, but that’s a lot of records!

Approximate amount of LPs left to add to the archive: 1625

Despite only having only about 15% the amount of LPs compared to 45s the LPs take up a huge amount of space. They’re just a bulky medium in comparison, but there’s so much stuff on LP that isn’t on 45 (and vice versa). The LP collection is much more focused on Country Gospel and private pressed records, whereas I have a ton of major label 45s that have made it into the collection. In doing this I’ve also found two full boxes of LPs I plan on selling that I have more than a couple copies of or don’t fit the criteria for me to keep. I keep at least 2 copies of any LP if I want them in the archive, so if I have more than that that are the same pressing those go into the sale box.

One last thing, the numbers above are just the records that are on discogs. I still have a large amount of things that have never been submitted, I might estimate about 10% of what I have, although that number is shrinking every day.

Sale List!
So I’ll be updating the sale list in the next few weeks to send out once again, and this time there will be 45s AND albums. I might even get fancy and grade everything even though that adds a lot of time.

If you’d like to be on the sale list email then drop me a line at host (at) dollar country (dot) org and I’ll send it your way once it’s ready.

Cheers
Franklin

Jan 2026: Streaming Server, Digital Organization, and Gospel Mixtape

Posted on by Frank The Drifter

Dollar Country ended 2025 with a lot of work that is invisible to the outside world, although it’s work that is incredibly important. I’ve taken on the task of organizing DC’s digital files. This got kicked off by my project to host a small streaming service for myself.

Dollar Country Streaming Server
I found myself without a streaming service last month and after thinking about what I wanted to do and trying a few things I decided not to pay for one at all. They’ve always felt unfortunate to me anyway, so this way I don’t have to feel like I’m supporting a system that is generally exploitative of the artists who make it possible. Multiple people had suggested I try self hosting my own music so I could listen to my collection via streaming instead of paying for a service. It seemed like a lot of work at first but after consideration I thought it made a lot of sense.

Plex is a streaming service that allows you to host your own media server. Many people use it for TV shows and movies, but it also works with music. Considering that the vast majority of music in the Dollar Country archive isn’t on any streaming service then this would allow me to actually be able to hear this stuff outside of putting the records on. I love putting on a record, but now I can listen to obscure country gospel LPs while I’m driving or out of the house. Ideally this streaming server would be available to many others, but I’m not entirely sure how that would work from a logistics and legal standpoint.

Digital Organization
Starting the Plex server made me realize that my digital files needed to be organized. In the last 9 years I’ve taken pictures of thousands of records and created tends of thousands of photos. According to windows I’ve got 27,709 label pictures that take up 33.5 gigabytes of space. This work is largely invisible to the outside world but I’ve found it to be very important to the work of archiving. If my folders are all mixed up and only I know how they are set up then that only helps me, when I standardize their organization it can be helpful to anyone who looks at it.

Over the years I’ve accumulated hundreds of newspaper clippings, thousands of pictures, and thousands of audio files that are all located in different folders. By the end of 2026 I aim to have all of this digital information organized so that when you click on the Eddie Noack folder you have folders for clippings, pictures of records, and audio instead of them being in three different places. From there I hope to be able to have audio digitized of large swaths of the collection to share. This information is great to have, but my goal is to have it available to people that aren’t me, so that’s where I’m trying to shift my focus this year. This is going to require a tremendous amount of work, if you’d like to help with data entry on the database then drop me a line at host@dollarcountry.org.

Gospel Mixtape
The biggest change that’s happened with having a streaming server is that I’ve gotten to spend much more time with the country gospel LPs in the archive. I love putting on a record and giving it a listen, but the huge volume of records in the archive prohibit me from actually doing that. When I have time to listen to the records I prioritize digitizing new ones and adding them to the stacks, so relistening rarely happens. Now that I can listen in the car I’ve been spending some serious time with these records and putting certain songs away for a mixtape I’d like to release. Gospel music spends a lot of time singing about getting to the other side. Death or what happens after. Having grown up non-religious, I find this very interesting and after asking people about this I’ve found that it is generally of interest to a lot of people.

So by following this thread of cancelling a streaming service we arrive at a large scale digital reorganization and a new DC mixtape. It’s interesting how following these paths can lead to places you never thought of at first.

See you next time,
Frank The Drifter