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

Yesterday I listened again to Andy Kershaw's 'near misses' for his Desert Island choices. He included a superb track by the Albion Band, called, "Poor Old Horse." I managed to find, in my collection of old cassettes, a copy of the album from which that comes:- "Rise Up Like The Sun". This recording is very poor quality and very worn but to my delight (and "delight" is no exaggeration) I have tracked down and ordered a CD reissue. The Line-up on this album reads almost like a ''who's who,'' including Ashley Hutchings, Phil Picket, John Tams, Richard and Linda Thompson, Andy Fairweather-Lowe, Julie Covington.........and all on the one album!! - - solid gold!!

There! Have I rung any bells??

Started in earnest to re-organise my music collection today. Guess what? I didn't get far. For one thing I need a to use as a temporary catalogue or maybe I'll use (even more) index cards; at least you can shuffle them!!

No, I'm just making excuses really The truth is that I keep stopping to play something and then........and then.......

Of course, I also keep finding gaps that simply have to be filled. They aren't physical gaps of course - - there's precious few of those; the shelves are groaning already. BUT you've simply got to have some things, however hard it is to find room for them. Hard to find the ''some things'' too in some cases. Actually took me over 60 years to find one song that I wanted.

Then, of course I am weak-willed and have to keep returning to the BBC Message Boards now and again (and again and........).

So! Haven't got very far today Have to try harder (sounds a bit like my old school History reports!!!)

More tomorrow probably. Might be making more sense by then.

Posted: Wednesday 21 March 2007 19:47:50

I'm doing some re-organisation as well. For one thing I'm getting rid of the plastic boxes on all CDs which I've recorded myself (ie ripoffs) and putting them all into a CD filing wallets - saves quite a bit of space.

I have lots of my recordings catalogued on a database but older stuff ie LPs reel-to-reel and cassettes is held in a collection of documents which I can't face transferring to the database.

It's easy to get swamped by the sheer volume of it all: I have over 1000 minidiscs, no idea how many hundreds of CDs, over 800 cassettes etc

Recently I've been re-using older minidiscs, since I felt that getting past the 1000 mark meant I had to do a bit of pruning. I record Andy Kershaw, Hear & Now and World Routes every week plus various other R3 & R4 programmes so it all adds up. Plus I'm starting to get quite a collection of recordings on my PC eg Swedish Radio P2's world music programme Klingan, which I can heartily recommend.

Hi Andy,

Your collection beats mine by quite a bit, but even jointly we'd never get near Andy K's. I'm jealous as hell!! I don't remember whether it was on his ''near-misses'' programme or elsewhere that it was mentioned but apparently his collection weighs about seven tons. It must be very satisfying to be able to say that, instead of X thousand!

It's all too easy to get distracted from all those good intentions. Many years ago, when my colleagues knew I was going to retire, they all said ''you'll soon get bored,'' and ''what will you find to keep yourself occupied?'' etc - Little did they know. Even now after 15 years of retirement I can honestly say I have NEVER been bored. I just wonder how I ever found the time to go to work.

On the subject of mini-discs, I too have started re-using some. Amongst other weird things, I still have 64 discs' worth of The Archers to catch up on. I might just have to write that off and start again, being a bit stricter with myself.

Still haven't decided what to do about the reel-to-reel stuff. Most of it has been superseded by more up to date media, but I really ought to go through it carefully to make sure I don't ditch something treasured by mistake. Way back in my mid-twenties I over-recorded some nostalgic stuff with Handel Organ Concertos; it took about twenty years to replace it!!

Re-reading the above, I seem to have had some degree of success in getting away from my normally weird writing style, but at the cost of lengthy rambling instead. I'll cut this off here and get back to organising for a bit.

Before I go, just out of curiosity, what reel/reel machine(s) do you use?

Posted: Thursday 22 March 2007 16:30:00

I have a Revox A77 which I bought in 1975 for about £300, which was a lot of money then, 2 to 3 month's salary I'd guess. I'm amazed that I can get much better quality than the Revox on a tiny minidisc recorder. I ought to go through my old reels and copy some of them, otherwise they're never going to get played.

Glad to hear you're a minidisc fan as well, I love them. I've got 5 recorders, the latest of which I bought at the start of January: the Sony MZ-RH1. This is a marvellous machine and one thing I particularly like about it is that I can transfer old SP and mono recordings to the PC - either to listen to them on there or to re-copy them to Hi-MD discs. I used to record the Archers omnibus onto MD every week but I've lost interest in it recently so I don't bother now.

Hi Andy,

I'm curious to know about Hi-MD. I tried talking to Sony but they were about as much use as a chocolate fireguard. Hope you don't mind my 'bashing your ear' but what little I do know suggests that you can get a lot onto them with very little loss. That has obvious appeal. I gather there is a 'special' (Hi-MD) disc which is a bit pricier than standard ones but that they are a bit difficult to come by.

What I particularly want to avoid is committing to a 'system' which will be superseded 'before I can say Jack Robinson.' I've already done that (to all intents and purposes) with LPs, reel/reel, and cassette. What is even worse is that 'standard' Mini-disc seems to be about to go the same way .

Any comments/suggestions?

Posted: Saturday 24 March 2007 23:27:00

Hi Mr-p,

I'll write in more detail about Hi-MD but meanwhile this page might offer some insights: http://www.minidisc.org/hi-md_faq.html

This is on THE site for MD enthusiasts ie http://www.minidisc.org/index.php

An MD80 gives you 2hr 20mins recorded Hi-SP which is getting on for twice as long.