VinylPrice (for Android) VinylPrice is a useful Android app that transforms your device into a tool that displays real-time album price information, but not much more.

VinylPrice (for Android)

  • Pros

    Fast and effective barcode scanning. Quickly returns search results. Taps Discogs's deep music database for real-time prices. Stores search history.

  • Cons

    App doesn't clearly define price color schemes. Lacks a store locator.

  • Bottom Line


Picture this: You stroll into your favorite record store to purchase Led Zeppelin II, but you're immediately taken aback by the album's $40 price tag. You sense that there's some significant markup in play, but have no way of knowing exactly how much. VinylPrice, a free Android app, removes the mystery swirling about a record's sticker price by tapping Discogs's music database to return real-time vinyl pricing information. VinylPrice is a fine tool to have at your disposal while album-hunting (it works with CDs, too!), but a few niggles prevent it from achieving true greatness.

How It Works
VinylPrice makes it a breeze to price albums. You can point your smartphone or tablet's camera at an album's barcode or key an album title into the search box. I preferred using the barcode method, because VinylPrice often recognized albums in a shorter time frame (usually a second or two) than it would take me to type a title into the search engine. Tip: Make certain there's bright light in the environment or VinylPrice will have trouble reading barcodes.

Search results are presented in a clean, three-column fashion. Album art lives in the left column, while publisher, release date, and region information lives in the center column. However, it's the right column that's of utmost importance; that's where you'll find pricing information.

VinylPrice (for Android)In The Wild
Prices (which you can set as EUR, USD, GBP, or JPY) are presented in three color tiers: green, yellow, and red. Unfortunately, VinylPrice doesn't tell you what the colors represent. I initially thought that green, yellow, and red stood for different album formats like cassette, CD, and vinyl. Thankfully, a quick trip to VinylPrice's Google Play store listing revealed that the green, yellow, and red colors represent the minimum, average, and maximum selling prices, respectively. You can tap the color stripes to see how much individual sellers are charging, and the album's condition. However, VinylPrice doesn't list the stores' names.

This information proved extremely helpful when I visited a local record store; I haggled $5 off Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Another cool feature: VinylPrice stores your search history, so you can quickly boot up prices at a later time.

My one major gripe with VinylPrice is that it lacks a store locator such as The Vinyl District offers. I'd rather buy my records from an independent store than, say, Amazon, but finding a brick-and-mortar record store isn't as easy as it used to be. Sure, a person could use Yelp or The Vinyl District, but it would be nice to have that functionality built into VinylPrice.

The Vinyl Word
If you want to make sure that you aren't getting swindled at your local record shop, then VinylPrice is the app to have downloaded to your Android smartphone or tablet. VinylPrice may lack a store locator and its color-coded price indicator proves confusing, but the app's real-time pricing information more than makes up for those oversights.

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