How Much Music Fits on Vinyl Records and Why It Matters

How much music fits on vinyl records without losing sound quality? Find out why many artists choose double LPs and what mastering tricks make your vinyl sound its best.

How Much Music Fits on Vinyl Records and Why It Matters

by Tony van Veen from the Disc Makers Blog

Ready to dive deep into the inexact science of how many minutes of music fit onto a vinyl record? This is a topic that has tripped up plenty of artists trying to put their album on vinyl. I’ll share how much music on your LP or single will help it sound its best, what the maximum number of minutes is, what the main factors are in determining how many minutes of music you can have on each side of your record, some of the things that mastering engineers do to squeeze a bit more time onto that record, and the downside of squeezing the maximum amount of music onto a record.

Optimal time per side

Let’s start by talking about how much time is optimal on each side of a record and what the recommended max is. Of course, the maximum time is driven by physics — it’s about how many grooves you can squeeze into the space you have on a 12-inch or 7-inch record. And yes, I know it’s technically only one long groove, but you get the gist, right? It’s about how close you can get that groove to run next to the groove beside it.

Now, if you’re interested in vinyl, you want your record to sound amazing, right? So for a 12-inch record at 33 1/3 RPM, the optimal length per side of the record is 18 to 20 minutes — roughly enough for five or six 3-minute songs per side. If your songs are longer than 3 minutes, you will fit fewer songs on your record. The recommended maximum program length per side is 22 minutes, meaning your album would be about 44 minutes long for both sides.

If your 12-inch spins at 45 RPM — a maxi-single — the optimal time for a great-sounding record is 12 minutes per side, and the max is 15. For 7-inch 45s, your optimal length per side is 3–4 minutes, and the max is 4.5 minutes. And at 33 1/3 RPM, which is kind of a niche thing occasionally done for EPs — popular in the punk scene, particularly, where they can include two or three short songs per side — the optimal length is 5 minutes per side, and the max is 6. So, is the maximum length I just mentioned really the maximum?

Main factors to consider

I hear from musicians from time to time, “Oh, I own an LP that’s 25 minutes per side!” And that is true — it is possible to cut longer sides than the 22-minute max that we recommend for an album, but it will impact your audio. So what are the factors that impact how long a vinyl program can be? Perhaps the biggest one is bass. The more bass — the more low-frequency there is on the record — the more the grooves need to modulate.

You know, the more extreme the jiggles in the groove. In each record, you see the grooves, and you see the spaces in between the grooves, called the groove separation or the land. In this image, you can clearly see a groove section that has high modulation.

More modulation means you need more spacing between your grooves. Look at how much space the high-modulation groove takes up compared to the low-modulation groove next to it. So, a lot of bass means more groove modulation, which means it takes up more space on the album, which means a shorter music program. Or, if the program is too long, the mastering engineer will need to reduce the bass during mastering, which leads to less modulation of the groove.

Mastering for vinyl

One thing to watch out for when mastering is that the grooves can’t be too close together. If they get so close that they touch or sometimes even slightly cross over into each other — what’s called an over cut — the stylus will want to skip from one groove to the next, which obviously leads to a defective record. This is why the mastering engineer pays such close attention to groove spacing when planning to cut your lacquer. Another issue that determines program length is the number of songs.

As we all know, between songs on an LP, there’s a short crossover — what the industry calls a VTM (visual track marker). That’s where the groove gets a little wider so you can drop your stylus on track three instead of at the start of the record. Because the groove is wider at the crossover, it takes up the equivalent of about 20 seconds of music, even though the silence may only be three or four seconds. Therefore, the more songs you have on a side, the more crossovers there are, and that can add up to the equivalent of a couple of extra minutes of music that have to be taken into account when mastering a record.

High frequencies, or treble, can also be problematic. It’s an interesting phenomenon, actually — as your groove gets closer to the center of the record, high frequencies — horns, cymbals, the letter “S” — can get slightly distorted. The data is all there in the groove, but there’s something about the way the stylus tracks the groove that makes those high frequencies prone to distortion closer to the center of the record than on the outside. This is why mastering engineers take into consideration where on an album a song is when they listen to your music before cutting a lacquer.

They prefer for songs with a lot of high frequencies be early on the side of the record — closer to the outside — rather than later, closer to the inside. Otherwise, they need to roll off some high frequencies on those songs or implement a de-esser, which limits the sibilance from those high frequencies.

Can an album side be longer than 22 minutes?

So, to answer the question: Can we cut an album side longer than 22 minutes? Yes, it is physically possible, but we don’t like doing it because we have to make all these compromises I just mentioned. They’ll need to roll off the bass to limit modulation in the groove. In extreme cases, they will change the bass to mono so that the groove itself doesn’t bump the stylus out.

And finally, the engineer will need to cut a shallower groove to fit more grooves into the available space. You can see in the same cross-section of an album side that for a regular depth cut — where there are, in this example, seven grooves in the space — when the lacquer is cut shallower, you can squeeze an extra groove into the same space. That means more time to play. The shallower groove itself doesn’t really impact the sound of the record.

The sound is impacted more by the EQ the engineer needs to adjust to limit groove modulation. However, a shallower groove does come with a slight risk that the record could skip more easily over time. By now, I hope you’ve figured out that mastering for vinyl is not just a quick, press-the-button-and-go process. A lot of prep goes into each album before the groove gets cut.

The engineer listens to the program, checks the timing and the number of tracks, plans the groove spacing, and makes some EQ adjustments as needed so it all fits on the record and sounds good. And as I said, that’s all done before the cutter stylus even touches that virgin lacquer. The issue with extra-long programs is that this prep and cutting process takes much longer than just the extra two, three, or four minutes of playing time per side. The engineer may need to listen to the music multiple times before planning how to cut the lacquer.

It also means that cross-cuts are more likely as the grooves get closer, which leads to more frequent recuts — one reason why mastering a program longer than 22 minutes is more expensive than one under 22 minutes. Why did I spend all this time talking about longer programs on vinyl? Because in today’s streaming world, most albums are way longer than 44 minutes. Heck, even our old friend the CD can hold over 70 minutes of music.

Is your album longer than 44 minutes?

Artists are frequently disappointed when they realize their album on vinyl can only be 44 minutes long. So what should you do if you have a long album program and want to put it on vinyl? The right thing to do is release a double LP. Yes, it doubles your vinyl cost pretty much, but man, fans love themselves a double LP — the extra weight, the fancy gatefold jackets … they’re amazing.

Let me close with this: these limitations and adjustments … they’re not a bug, they’re a feature. They are what makes vinyl special. The craft of it, the uniqueness of it, the way it changes the sound — it’s so perfect you may never want to listen to Spotify again. So go ahead, press that record. You won’t regret it — I promise.

Tony van Veen is the CEO of DIY Media Group, the parent company of Disc Makers and BookBaby. As a college student, he played in indie bands, created his own LPs, cassettes, and t-shirts, and sold them at shows. Today, he collects CDs, vinyl LPs, and concert t-shirts to support the artists he loves.