Category Archives: Media

Goodbye, VHS

Posted on Thursday, 28. August 2014 by hmvh

Farewell, VHS. The time has finally come to lay you to rest. It was April 2014 that everything related to VHS was rounded up for the final curtain call of a play dubbed “VHS2AVI”. The VHS digitisation project was ready to begin. Continue reading →

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VHS digitisation: Theory before practice

Posted on Sunday, 20. April 2014 by hmvh

Ripping a bunch of VHS tapes is a most peculiar undertaking. It’s a project I’ve been waiting to start for several years. It’s a task that’s as simple or as complicated as you make it. I chose the less simple route because I wanted to understand a few things first. Continue reading →

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About recordable disc inlay cards

Posted on Sunday, 7. April 2013 by hmvh

As someone who created a substantial number of CD-R items over the years and spent inordinate amounts of time designing elaborate inserts for his personal audio collection, one trick I learnt is to add inlay cards to act as stiffeners behind ordinary 80g paper. Inlay cards became as regular material components of my CD production line as would colourful cases, and this collected stash of inlays turned up again a few weeks ago. Continue reading →

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The death of printed media

Posted on Sunday, 5. April 2009 by hmvh

In a previous post I lamented the death of physical music carriers as our music purchasing and listening habits are progressively being overtaken by downloadable MP3 or similar formats. It’s therefore a logical progression to do the same about a music magazine that disappeared from the shelves in April 2002. With entire libraries of books available in digital format online or downloadable to your Kindle, it comes as quite a surprise that the internet hadn’t actually saved more forests sooner. Continue reading →

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The death of the Compact Disc, part 1

Posted on Friday, 27. February 2009 by hmvh

Who hasn’t fallen for the charms of iTunes, MusicLoad, AmazonMP3 and/or Beatport for all their musical needs, buying and downloading gigabytes of music that you cannot touch or feel? Call me old-fashioned if you will, but nothing beats picking up a real record and admiring the physical, real entity that I hold in my hands. A record is a work of art. A recording is a historical artefact. Continue reading →

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Recordable media and disposable data

Posted on Saturday, 31. January 2009 by hmvh

Having just completed the first item on my list of “things to do” for the year, it occurred to me that “mixtapes” are something of a dying artform. At least, in physical form. No, seriously: when last have you made a compilation of your favourite songs and burnt those to a CD-R as a proper Red Book Audio CD? Continue reading →

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X Files + Tapes = August, part 2

Posted on Sunday, 31. August 2008 by hmvh

In other exciting news, I finally completed watching the entire X Files series. And as for the other, “secret” tape project: still collecting and amassing more samples. Continue reading →

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Music vs. VHS

Posted on Saturday, 5. January 2008 by hmvh

In the past, people associated the word “videos” with cassettes with movies on them. In the current context, sound and audio quality play a mere supporting role but when you precede the word “videos” with the word “music”, you suddenly have a completely different form of art. Continue reading →

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