How we check
Every page here is meant to answer one question honestly: is this record on vinyl, which pressing should you actually buy, and where. Here’s how we get to that answer.
The Sleeve Notes started because looking up whether an album exists on vinyl — and which of its dozen reissues is the one worth owning — is still weirdly hard. Discogs is a catalogue, not a recommendation. Retailer pages want to sell you whatever’s in stock. Nobody tells you the 2012 repress is a brick and the original is fifteen dollars.
Where the data comes from
The backbone of the catalogue is MusicBrainz, the open, community-run music encyclopedia. It’s released into the public domain (CC0), and critically it records the format of every release — so we can tell a record that was genuinely pressed to vinyl from one that only ever shipped on CD or streaming. Cover images come from the Cover Art Archive.
We don’t mirror that data and walk away. A release existing in a database is not the same as a record you can buy today, in decent shape, at a price that isn’t a joke.
What “checked” actually means
Before a pressing appears on a page with a buy link, we confirm it’s genuinely available — a live listing, in stock, at a real price — and we track more than one seller where we can, so a single opportunistic listing doesn’t set the tone. When we say a pressing is the best value, we mean we compared the current options and that one wins on price-for-condition, not that it pays us the most.
The verdict on each page is an opinion, and we sign it. If we think the reissue is worse than a cheap original, we say so — even when the reissue is the one that’s easy to sell you.
Why we’re unusually good on Australian records
We keep a much deeper file on Australian pressings than most international sites bother with — local plants, catalogue numbers, which era was cut from the master tapes, which repressings to avoid. That comes from a live connection to a large Australian music dataset, and it’s the part of the site we’re proudest of. If you collect Australian vinyl, this is meant to be the reference you couldn’t find before.
What we get wrong
Prices move. Stock sells. A pressing we called common can dry up. We re-check pages on a schedule and stamp each one with the date it was last verified, but if something’s off, tell us — we’d rather fix it than defend it.