I’ll never forget what one of the American guys said to someone regarding digital capture technology, when the discussion came around to how wonderful it was. “When you digitise shit,” he said matter of factly, “you don’t get gold: you get a digital shit.”

His point, buried in that surprisingly un-American-like comment, was of course that unless the source material is good, digitising it won’t help – you’ll only end up with a more-or-less exact copy that won’t get any worse.

I was reminded of this the other day when I carted two boxes of CDs down from the loft. My plan is to digitise them all as audio files and then ebay/car boot/charity/sling them accordingly. Having finally made the big decision to get rid of them all, the thing is, I was then faced with an even tougher choice: what format to choose?

I plumped for Windows Media Pro Audio at 192KBps, which means that I am technically sacrificing half of the audio information somewhere. Lost forever, never to be heard again.

Will it matter? Probably not, but the loss of the music data will probably be easier to take than saying goodbye to some of the discs; one of which was my first ever CD single bought in 1990 in HMV Oxford Street – Adamski’s Killer.

That’s the price of progress I guess.