Enjoy retro charm of educational CD-ROMs

Technofile: The trouble with technology is that, quite a lot of the time, it exists almost for its own sake. However, some technology can at least be more enriching than the average "hot new gadget".

One example is educational CD-ROMs. These were once the great white hope among some sections of the education establishment. During the early 1990s, great predictions were made about the rise of the CD-ROM, to some extent mirroring the hype that surrounded the internet a few years later. CDs were to herald the great new wave of digital learning that would transform our classrooms and businesses.

But format wars - CD-ROM vs "CD-i" - and high prices, at least in the early days, along with uninspiring treatments of subjects, often kept CD-ROMs in the background. When the "free content" internet took off in the mid to late 1990s, it seemed like the gradual incursion of broadband would make CD-ROMs obsolete forever.

But two things continue to work in the CD's favour. Firstly, the business model of publishing CDs and getting consumers to pay for a package of content delivered on a physical CD is hard to argue with. It's stronger than the internet's complicated charging models, where people expect things to be free.

Secondly, even though broadband internet access has taken off, it's still possible to deliver a rich experience on CD-ROM, with a lot more content than a broadband internet site and less of the glitches sites are subject to.

So, Technofile readers, enamoured as we are here with the next big thing in gadgets and gizmos, we thought we'd try something educational, and - dare we utter the phrase? - life-enriching for a change.

To this end - and being someone who wished they'd paid attention on guitar lessons all those years ago - I tested eMedia's Guitar Method CD-ROM, available from Guildsoft.co.uk, priced €122.

Endorsed by legendary rocker Peter Frampton no less and packing over 70 songs, the CD-ROM takes the beginner through the simplest stages of learning guitar, through to reading notation and more complex songs.

The CD-ROM, which works on both MacOS and Windows, comes with full-motion video, live recorded audio and animated work on the fretboard, so you never feel left to work it out on your own. Usefully, you can also slow the music down as you like with variable speed MIDI tracks. Also included is a chord dictionary, a digital metronome and digital recorder, so you can record your progress.

Perhaps key to the whole thing is that it teaches you how to play whole songs, rather than leaving you floundering in a sea of technical exercises.

After a few tries I had a Dylan song almost down pat - although the voice continues to elude me.

In the sea of hot new products that seem to appear on a daily basis in the technology world, it is sometimes easy to forget that some of this stuff can actually make life a little more pleasant - as opposed to faster, quicker and more productive.