Most of us don’t have the room in our homes or offices to keep an impressive collection of our old media such as vinyl, CD’s, Photos and even VHS videos and DVDs. If this sounds like you then you have a few options that can help.
The first option when you run out of room is to simply throw them out and buy them all again. However, with this, you lose classic items that could either hold sentimental value or in the future monetary value. Imagine having a first vinyl of the Beatles for example and throwing it away. Ouch!
If you don’t want to throw your items away there is a better option. Firstly, we’d recommend putting your items into storage. Self-storage is cheaper than buying a new home so for a small fee, it could be worth it.
Before putting your items into storage though, you should digitise them. By doing so you can store all of your old media on your computer or in the cloud and save so much room in your home.
Below we will look at some of the best ways to convert your old media into new media.
Vinyl to Digital
Converting your old vinyl records to digital is quite easy when you have the right tools, but it may seem complicated at first. To convert your vinyl records to digital copies you are going to need the following:
A turntable, a phono stage and an analogue to digital converter. You’re also going to need editing software to capture and edit your music. When you have set your computer up along with the turntable it’s then as simple as playing on the turntable and capturing the music onto your computer.
You can then put your old vinyl records into storage or out of the way so you have more room in your home, meanwhile allowing your records to age and hopefully increase in value.
Photos to Digital
Converting photos to their digital counterparts is easy, all you need is a good scanner and photo editing software such as Photoshop. You can get a free trial of Photoshop on their website.
The learning curve with Photoshop can take time so be patient with it, if you are finding it difficult you could use an online photo converting service as they can edit your photos and digitize them much quicker than if you were to do it on your own. The only downside is that converting them yourself will save you money.
VHS to Digital
Converting old movies to digital copies will not only save you space in your home but it will also help you keep your memories for longer. Old movies such as christenings, weddings, or any special events for that matter were usually captured on old VHS tapes back in the day and these tapes can be easily damaged.
Transferring VHS tapes to digital is quite similar to transferring vinyl to digital in that you need a device to play the media and a device to capture the media.
To convert VHS to digital yourself you will need a VHS player, an old movie, a USB capture device and a PC. The only item you probably don’t have is the USB capture device, but these are easily found on websites such as Amazon.
A USB capture device will have the scart leads on one end which plugs into your VHS player and a USB on the other end which plugs into your computer. All you then have to do is play the video on your VHS player and set up your screen recording software on your PC.
The above takes a lot of time but it’s the cheapest option. If you have many tapes to convert this may take too long, if this is the case you may want to pay a company to convert your VHS tapes into digital for you.
Conclusion
Converting your old media into new media will not only allow you to make more space in your home or office, but it will also prolong the life of that media. Converting your files to digital copies also allows you to protect your most precious memories by adding them to multiple storage locations.
A photo that is stored on a hard drive, a laptop, in the cloud and in physical form is much safer than just having the physical copy. If you have family images and videos that mean anything to you, we would highly recommend backing them up digitally.