Alex

THE STORY

An ordinary collector

Alex is not the collector you picture when you hear the word. He didn't buy a turntable to match the sofa, and his life doesn't revolve around a shelf of records. He has a day job in design, a girlfriend, friends, and weekends that have nothing to do with music. Records are simply the thing he loves, the way most people who own a turntable love it.

He bought his first record at 25. It happened after a long evening with an old-school collector — a classmate's father whose shelves held the classics: The Beatles, Queen, everything a rock fan of that generation was supposed to own. Alex had always listened to rock and played guitar himself, so none of the names were new. What was new was the sound. That evening, for the first time, he heard the difference between a record and the MP3s he had been downloading onto a Pentium III and playing through Winamp: the warmth, and how a record never plays quite the same way twice.

He didn't go home and buy a collection. He bought one record. Then another. As of late September 2026 the count stands at 189, mostly classic rock, with one absolute love: Pink Floyd. The number grew the way ordinary collections do, a little at a time. From every trip he brings back a record instead of a fridge magnet. In any capital city, the flea market is a mandatory stop — not for the rare pressing, but because there's always something worth digging for.

The ritual is simple. A record on, the lights low, a glass of good wine. The part he likes most is watching the sound: analog needles swinging to the music in a dark room. That is where CrateCore began. Pulse is the core in the name, the first thing the app was built around. Everything else followed from the way a collector like Alex actually lives with records: birthdays, release anniversaries and reissues scattered across dozens of sources; turntable speed checked with a paid app or a separate gadget; stylus hours scribbled on a piece of paper; a shelf and a hi-fi chain worth showing off to friends. The app puts all of it in one place.

That's also why Alex edits the daily stories: as someone with a job and a life of his own, he still wants to know what happened on this day, which record just turned fifty, and what's coming back on vinyl next month.