Why Reclaim Media is Better than Digitizing In-House

(by Craig Meyer, craig@reclaimmedia.com) (All Articles)

Once your radio station or institution decides that digitizing is the way to go, now what? Given that your collection is most likely unique, rare or in many cases irreplacable, it often makes sense to go with "the default option" of acquiring and setting up a digitizing facility in-house and staffing it with whatever spare and/or free volunteer labor is handy.

Depending on the size of your collection, and especially if it's in or beyond the ballpark of 50,000 pieces, the "default" in-house route to a digital library is usually the wrong one in terms of economy, speed, quality and consistency. Further, Reclaim Media can neutralize safety concerns by setting up and operating from a temporary facility at your location (like we are proposing to do for CKUA in Edmonton, Canada):

1: Safety
By setting up and staffing a temporary on-site digitization facility either in your building or at least across town, your audio materials will never be far away. They will be in either our hands or yours at all times, and never with a third party like a shipping company. Our digitization technology is scalable and refined enough such that we can actually do this without appreciably sacrificing efficiency so long as the collection to be digitized is large enough. The question of safety is usually the most-formiddable impediment to decision-making toward accessing the speed and consistency of an "outside" commercial service like ours, and this is how we help you get around it.

2: Speed
Our scalable digitization technology lets us expand throughput to meet your budgeting and scheduling needs with a minimum of additional staffing (which we also handle). Our investment in automation lets us leverage labor expense across many tape players and/or record turntables operating in parallel. Only our computerized and database-backed processes make this possible without multiplying errors as well. This way, even millions of pieces can be digitized in a consistent fashion across years instead of decades. This can be a key enabler to your ability to access funding at all because you can reasonably show why the project will be finished well within your tenure and that of your fellow decision-makers.

3: Consistency
Digitizing archival-class audio still requires skill and smart decision-making, but with us, that skill has been embedded in our hardware choices and proprietary processes, and the right decision-making into our custom software. What this means is that you can reasonably expect that, and explain why, your very last piece of analog media will be digitized in the exact same way as the first. Without automation, where the project is done over significantly more time and with more technicians of different experiences and opinions, such consistency is basically impossible to ensure, especially at the outset. Our uniquely defendable promise of consistent audio and data quality helps you make decisions now, because you won't have maintain certification regimes to regulate and monitor what you'll be getting over time.

4: Completeness
This isn't just about audio. That's not enough. It's also about the printed materials that come with your audio recordings. A cassette's storage case and the tape itself contain important written information that will be absolutely required if their corresponding digital audio is to ever be catalogued or made searchable. Likewise, vinyl records come with artistically-designed jackets, informative booklets and important data printed right on their circular labels on the records themselves.

We capture ALL of this data photographically. We have invested in factory-scale integration with multi-megapixel digital cameras to capture all of this data quickly and affordably. The fine print on a dollar bill is easily legible from our pictures. This way, all information in and on the audio recordings has been captured digitally. This is true audio archival, and it enables web-based interfaces to your archive in its entirety for searching, auditioning, markup, data-entry, commenting and tagging. This is everything you can do to make your audio archive complete, relevant and meaningful.

5: Affordability
With our proprietary automation technology, a couple of decently-paid technicians can do the work of a roomful of high-cost audio engineers and sysadmins. As a result, our costs are significantly lower than absolutely anyone's while still delivering consistent quality. For example, KCRW, a public radio station in California, chose us to digitize their music library of 16,000 vinyl records because our quote was a full order of magnitude less than our competitor's and for a quarter the time frame.

6: Future-Proof
All digitization projects we do result in two data sets: One for archival and another for day-to-day use. The archival data set is based on FLAC, a lossless and open-source compressed audio format not subject to the whims or fortunes of any company. Photographic data is stored in open-source formats as well. This ensures your ongoing access to your digital audio well into the future.

Archival set audio from analog recordings like vinyl records and cassettes is captured at 96,000 samples/second 24-bit stereo, the same fidelity recommended and used by the Library of Congress.

A second data set, usually compressed to whatever format is conveniently palatable to your audio database program, is then derived from the archival set. So if your Dalit system requires WAV files with no attached photographic images, or your OMT requires MP3 with a maximum of just one image each, you're covered. We will generate whatever special-purpose format of audio files you need. If that data set becomes obsolete years later for any reason, a different set can be made, by us or anyone else, from the same inclusive archival data set described above. Whatever happens, you can always go back to your archival data and re-generate what you need.

We hope you've found this paper interesting, and that you will bring us whatever follow-up comments, questions or concerns you might have.

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