h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've done all the CD's now, and have finally opened the Cassette Digitiser I bought ages ago to start transferring all the kiddies' Musicassettes that our children enjoyed in the 80s, for the use of the grandchildren (and probably even more for the nostalgic enjoyment of their parents!)

However, the gadget is not very good, and even when it's plugged into the laptop, the cassettes are driven by battery power which means they stop, start and, worse still, go faster and slower at different places. Impossible to sing along to!

Also I've broken a tape already, and can't for the life of me remember where I put that repair kit all those years ago.

I'll have to see if I can hitch up the stereo (yes, we still have a cassette player there!) to the laptop and hope that they will play a bit smoother that way.

To think that cassette tapes were the state of the art medium at such a crucial time, and many of them are now useless.

I also have a record player that converts vinyl records to mp3s, but it doesn't seem to be working properly.

I know mp3's aren't thought of as good quality sound, but this is mainly for use in the car, and quite honestly, I'm not really very sensitive about this sort of thing.

I'm definitely going to have to put in for my pension now, as this looks like becoming a full time job. I wish hubbie would start on digitalising the tens of thousands of slides he has stacked away - I'd love to see them again, and they will be fading even as I write.

By the time we get round to the VHS tapes, the digitised formats we are now using will probably be out of date. But then, we shall probably be six feet under and someone will come along and chuck the lot out anyway.

Just realised that it's a blessing that we never even started on Super 8.

Keeping up with the changes in technical formats seems like a losing proposition to me. Who profits from the transition from vinyl to cassette to digital formats? The companies with big hoards of recorded music/movies. People who liked something in an early format will be encouraged to buy the same thing on the new format. Easy profits without the need to create new recording from scratch.

When you digitize something, you're making a copy, with inevitable loss in fidelity. The companies that own the masters for these recordings will tend to keep these losses to a minimum.

They're going to make a profit any way you slice it.

I've been gradually digitising all my father's photos. These cover the period 1952 to about 1990. After that he stopped taking photos. I've got them all done up to 1977.

When I'm finished them, I'll start on my own photos, which is a bigger job as I took a lot of pictures. Thankfully in the days of film and prints, a lot meant only a few hundred per year. I stuck the best into albums and dumped the rest so I don't have to digitise bad pictures.

With digital cameras, the tendency is to take far to many pictures and keep them all.

I have a cassette player somewhere in the attic and I have a lead which allowed me to connect it to my previous computer, but I've changed computers since I last used it so I don't know if it will work with the new computer. I have a few cassettes which might be worth digitising - one is of a friend singing a song which he recorded himself.

Home-made recordings are, of course, important to save in whatever way you can.