One LED per record slot or just light whole sections - what would you do?

I went with sections on my jazz shelf and honestly it works better than I expected. I have around 300 records across three cases, and I divided each case into zones of roughly 15 records using a single strip cut and reconnected at those points. When I search for an album in my spreadsheet, the whole zone lights up, and flipping through 15 spines takes maybe ten seconds. The time savings compared to hunting the whole wall is still huge, and I never had to map hundreds of individual positions or worry about my mapping drifting out of date every time I add or weed records. The mapping thing is the real killer with per-slot, in my expirience. My collection reorganizes itself constantly, new arrivals get squeezed in, and every time that happens your slot map is wrong. Zones survive reshuffling fine becasue you just relabel wich zone covers which range.

On the glow question, since my listening room is also dim, I set a low brightness preset and use a warm color instead of the default white. With the strip hidden behind the lip and diffused against the wall it reads as soft ambient light rather than a beacon. I can drop it to a dim red for actual listening if I want almost nothing.

And yes, half the payoff for me was absolutely the building. I spent a whole weekend soldering connections at the zone points and enjoyed every minute of it.

I went the other direction on my own shelf, though not for the reason you'd expect. The per-slot version earns its keep on the put-away side, not the searching side. Finding an album among 300 is a skim no matter what. The real failure mode is sliding something back in the wrong gap, and a zone light doesn't stop that, it just tells you that you're in the general neighborhood of your mistake. One light per slot means the shelf itself corrects you before the error happens.

The soldering worry turned out to be smaller than I thought. I ran a single uncut strip of the dense 144-per-meter type along the shelf lip, and since record sleeves packed snug land right around that spacing, I got one LED per slot without a single joint. Just one strip, one data wire, done. Mapping the positions was the tedious part, and I did it by lighting each LED one at a time and writing down where the glow landed.

On the distraction question, dim rooms are actually where this shines if you cap the brightness low and pick a warm color. I also set mine to fade out on its own after a few minutes, so it's a pointer, not a nightlight. And yes, the building was most of the payoff. The usefulness is real but modest, and I'd be lying if I said the lookup time savings justified a weekend with a soldering iron.

I've been thinking about doing something similar for my bookshelf actually, and this thread is making me want to try it. One thing I can't figure out from reading here: how does the little light box know which section to light up? Like, do you have to have your phone or computer open and send it a command every time, or can it just react on its own once you set it up? I ask because I'd want it to work even when my laptop is off in another room.

I'd push back on the idea that zones just survive reshuffling fine. Whenever I weed or add a batch of records, everythign past that point shifts, so the zone boundaries in my notes end up stale the same way a slot map would, just less often. And a stale zone is sneakier because it looks correct, it lights up confidently and points you at fifteen wrong spines instead of one wrong slot. I ended up putting the boundary albums themselves in the notes, like 'zone 3 starts at the Coltrane section,' so a shift is obvious when I'm standing there. Still fewer labels to maintain than per-slot, but it's not the set-and-forget thing it sounds like.

Kids these days don't know they're born. Back when I wired up my CD rack we cut and spliced every run by hand, no two ways about it. These days you don't have to cut anything. Just leave the strip in one piece and set up segments in the app, one segment per zone, save each as a preset. Tap the preset, zone lights. I redid my setup that way a couple years back and the shelf wiring is cleaner for it. Only thing to watch is voltage drop on a long single run, feed power from the middle if the far end looks dim and pink when it should be white.

One thing I'd add from my own build: don't just stick the bare strip to the shelf lip with the factory tape. Mine started peeling within a month, the adhesive hates dusty wood. I threw mine in some aluminum channel with a diffuser cover and screwed that under the lip instead. Looks cleaner, the light spreads nicer across the spines, and it hasn't budged in two years. Also gives you something solid to clip wires to at the zone points. Costs a bit more but I stopped fighting with drooping strip corners, which was half my frustration on the first attempt.