3 Ways to Recover the Great Memories Stored on Old Media

While analog media formats might not be totally dead, they’re definitely less convenient than their digital equivalents.

If you’ve got a back catalog of content that you want to convert, there are a few ways to go about it, so here’s a look at what you’ll need to do to bring archaic media kicking and screaming into the digital age.

 

Rediscovering Your Old Photos: Techniques for Digitizing and Preserving Your Prints

Do you have a pile of old photos that you want to recover? Don’t despair. Digitizing and preserving your prints can be done easily with the right tools. Everyone needs to know how to turn their analog photographs into digital formats, so here are some tips for getting started:

First off, make sure you have the proper equipment needed for scanning prints. You’ll need a flatbed scanner or a photo scanner, depending on your needs.

Then select the resolution setting that best suits your purpose — higher resolutions will yield better quality digital images but will also take up more storage space on your computer or another device. Image optimization will give you more wiggle room in this regard.

After scanning each photo individually, it’s time to save them in either JPEG or TIFF format which is suitable for both printing and viewing online later on.

Lastly don’t forget to back up all of your scanned images onto an external hard drive or to a cloud storage platform.

 

Rewinding Cassettes and 8-Tracks: Tips and Tricks for Saving Audio Recordings

Whether you’ve got audio recordings from your childhood or commercially produced cassettes that you purchased in bygone decades, they deserve to be saved. You can turn to a professional digitization service provider if you want to convert a cassette to digital format to save yourself a bit of time and effort.

If instead, you want to handle this yourself, you’ll need an audio interface that connects your computer or device with a cassette deck or 8-track player.

After you’ve connected everything properly, it’s time to start recording. To do this, install and run a software tool like Audacity which will allow you to record each track individually, plus add any effects if necessary. You’ll need to leave the tape playing during this process, as you would when copying content from cassette to cassette in the old days.

Once all tracks have been recorded, save them in either WAV format if they’re going straight onto the disc or MP3 format if they’re meant for streaming online later on.

 

Reviving Your VHS Tapes: Simple Steps to Transferring Video to Digital Formats

Plenty of people still have old VHS tapes just waiting to be watched tucked away in the attic or gathering dust in the garage. Reviving these tapes and transferring them into digital formats is easier than you think.

Once again you’ve got the option of paying for someone else to do the legwork, but if you want the homebrew approach, make sure you have a video capture card or dongle that’s compatible with analog video input.

Capture devices often come with their own recording software, but you can also use a separate tool like Adobe Premiere to record footage as it’s played out in real-time.

Remember that video files will be a lot larger than image or audio files, so you’ll need more storage space available to save them once captured.

 

Wrapping Up

Whether you recover and digitize your old media at home or pay a pro to do it for you, you’ll really be glad that you took the time to keep these cherished memories safe. The longer you leave it, the more likely that the original media will get damaged or become terminally degraded.


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