There are many reasons to digitise one’s records and store them on your PC: to preserve them from ageing, to make duplicate copies that can be kept in different places or to create slide shows, to perhaps show to future generations.

Today, almost any document, movie or musical recording can be easily digitized and stored on a hard drive. It does not cost a lot. Here are some broad guidelines on how to do it.

Home movies:
A simple way to do it is the way movie pirates do: project the image on a white wall, set up a digital or dvd camcorder on a tripod, and then shoot the film!

If you want to transfer VHS recording, which is analog, into your PC then your computer needs to receive the data digitally. You can check to see if your PC is so equipped to do that. Just look at the computers ports – If it has the familiar RCA inputs which are the yellow, white and red connectors, then it is most likely analog ready.

You can also connect a standalone VHS player to a DVD recorder to make a digital copy.

You can also record VHS tapes to a computers hard drive by plugging the VCR’s output cable into a digital camcorder that offers a “pass through” mode (most of them do). The signal is digitized within the camcorder, and then passed on to the computer’s hard drive.

Documents/photographs:
You have heard of all-in-one printers which have become pretty common. These are machines that print, scan and handle faxes. With optical character recognition software, which is included with such devices it can recognize printed text and convert it into a form that can be edited by a word processing program.

Photographs can be scanned and saved in the JPEG format.

Music:
Getting your favorite old music albums into your PC is not that difficult. If you still have a phonograph turntable or cassette deck, plug the audio output from the turntable’s amplifier/receiver into the mini mike port found on almost all home computers. You can then install Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net), a free program available for Macs, PCs and Linux/Unix machines that will manage the files, convert them into a specific format (for example mp3 or WAV) and remove the crackles and clicks.

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