I’ve been working on and off to digitize photos, videos, music and other media. Some efforts have been relatively easy, some much less so. Here’s a quick summary of what I’m using:

Photos:

For long-term storage and organization, I’m using Mylio+ on Windows, iOS and Mac. This is a subscription product, about $130/year. This product stores all of your photos in “vaults” on devices you control (your hard drive, your mobile device, and others.) You can also setup mirrors of these vaults on other devices, and cloud-based backups as well. They’ve made many many enhancements since I started using the system a few years ago. Updating metadata for each photo is particularly key, and it has a reasonably robust system for identifying and tagging people, places and things.

For print photos, I’m using PhotoMyne. Another subscription, about $49/year. This app makes it fairly simple to arrange 1-10 photos on a flat, well-lit surface, take a picture of them using your iPhone camera, and then automatically separates them into individual photos, straightening them and cleaning them up. It was invaluable when I was gathering photos for my daughter Bethany’s wedding last year, many of which were taken before we started using digital. A caveat: I bought a cheap USB/LED lighting setup for about $20 to address lighting problems, a couple of “clickers” that operate the shutter button on my phone through bluetooth to avoid movement, and a flexible stand to hold my iPhone above the pictures. The photos really need to come out of photo album pages before you scan them, especially for really old albums.

Videos:

We have a fairly large (~100) VHS videotapes ranging from 20-40 years old. They are decaying, and we haven’t had a VCR attached to our main system for years. Fortunately, most of the tapes were “time-shifting” recordings of broadcasts (remember when people did that?) I was able to use an inexpensive (~$40) USB adapter to connect to one of our old hifi VCRs, and have been able to transfer some of the tapes using that an OBS Studio ($free). The quality is a bit less than great, and I might send some of the tapes off to professional services.

We have about a dozen 8mm videocassettes (Sony). I haven’t used our circa 1991 Sony Handycam in many years, and was disappointed to find it no longer powers on reliably or plays anything. For these tapes, I used a local-to-me conversion company, Heirloom Cloud Inc. Not the cheapest service at about $20/tape, but they did the work in about a week and I was able to download the results from their cloud service. I’ll probably use them again.

I’m not digitizing DVD or Blu-ray disks much, but it’s pretty easy to do using MakeMKV and an external drive. For now, I’m subscribing to a private Plex server that has virtually everything I own already on it.

I did setup a Synology NAS system with 4 drives, so I have a local network attached storage array with 20TB available. This also runs a local Plex server for my video collection, and runs a few other container applications for other functions. There are cheaper large external disks available, but I’ve had bad luck with most of them, as they stop working after a few years.

Music:

I’m using J-River Media Center for my digital music collection. This is about $40/version (lots of other price options) and runs on various platforms. It has been exceptional for organizing and fixing up the tagging on the music (getting the artists/titles/tracks/artwork/etc. right.) It plays back virtually all music formats and can handle high-definition devices like DACs for lossless playback. It also acts as a DLNA client and server, so I can play the music on various devices. I’m slowly but surely ripping CDs to FLAC files, which don’t play nice with Apple Music but otherwise seem to be the best format. I avoid using MP3 or other lossy formats, and am trying to weed out old low-res files. I occasionally buy a high-res copy of certain recordings, but have found that my 65-year-old ears are not quite what they used to be (I never was a “golden-ears” listener.)

My most critical listening happens through my iPhone, using a pair of Sennheiser Momentum headphones and a USB-C headphone DAC from iFi. I can play my network library several different ways using J-River’s J-Remote app, DLNA apps, PlexAmp and others.

A/V System:

We’re one of the shrinking group of people that have a 5.1 surround-sound system with a A/V Receiver and actual separate speakers – not great ones, but they do the job. We use an Apple TV 4 (the 2022 model) for virtually all of our video and music listening – by far the best option I’ve tried. The receiver is a Denon 7.1 model that we got from Costco. We do have an aging Sony Blu-ray player, which also plays SACDs. (I have a separate player than can rip them.) We have Roku devices in our other rooms.

We are “cord-cutters”. We were able to switch to AT&T fiber when they finally wired our neighborhood – this has been worlds better than Comcast, WOW or AT&T U-verse – fortunately we’ve always had choices here. Most of the time, we watch one of the paid services, and I’ve been paying for ad-free versions of YouTube TV, Apple TV, Netflix, and YouTube Premium (and for some reason paying to share the accounts with grown family members.) I find myself watching YouTube Premium more than anything else. We generally only watch news and some sports on YouTube TV, but that does have DVR functionality. We’ve tried using an attic antenna for over-the-air (OTA) TV, which generally works okay, but don’t have a device that can record from that. It’s surprising to me how hard it is to find a stream of the evening news programs.

I can expand on any of these – let me know if you’re interested!