DaveRo's idea of digitising an LP whenever you feel like listening to one makes good sense. The trouble in my case is that I seldom do feel like just sitting down and listening. That applies even to recently acquired CDs: I listen to them once or twice in the car, then into the cupboard they go for years.

Once the recordings are in the form of digital files, whether FLAC, MP3, uncompressed WAV or whatever, copying from old media onto new ones is comparatively quick and easy. The only problem is knowing when to do it before the old media become unreadable. Then again, some of those old media may last longer than we do.

For some videos that I was dealing with on behalf of a society, I made copies onto a hard disc and two different brands of "archival quality" DVDs, to be kept in three different houses.