Digitizing 16,000 records in 10 months for KCRW

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

KCRW is a public radio station in Santa Monica, California, specializing in presenting a wider variety of the world's music than commercial stations. Their internal music library includes 30,000 vinyl records and 25,000 CDs.

To have such a huge variety of musical eras and styles to choose from was a blessing, but also a curse because the "transaction cost" of accessing it was so high. Their library was so large that most of its contents were unknown to most of the DJ's most of the time.

Every individual record had an enthusiastic champion at one time when it was submitted to the library, but remains unknown to almost everyone else, especially after the record's champion has departed the organization. This means that over time, a greater and greater proportion of KCRW's CDs and records were effectively "lost" to its current programming. They were sitting there on shelves all along, ready to be played, but that very rarely happened because it was just too time-consuming to go down to the library, pull out records at random, sit down and listen to them. Such research represents a great investment of time and attention that few publicly-supported radio stations can afford.

So KCRW had a great variety of music in its possession, but never accessed most of it, which begged the rhetorical question of whether they actually had that music or not or could use it to benefit themselves or their listeners. The variety and uniqueness of its programming were deteriorating against what they could and should have been, which could very well end up resulting in ever-less-productive fund drives.

The solution was digitizing. Now digitized into a central digital music library, their music is no longer "locked up" on CDs or vinyl records but can be searched, browsed, auditioned and programmed easily and from multiple locations. KCRW's wide and eclectic music collection has "returned to circulation."

KCRW chose the Dalet media database system to house their music. Basically an industrial-class Apple iTunes, Dalit facilitates the searching, browsing and programming of songs and passages from a database of audio files. Songs are imported into Dalit as WAV files, each accompanied by an XML metadata file.

In just less than a year, Reclaim Media produced the WAV and XML files from each of the 16,000 vinyl records that KCRW chose to digitize (out of a total of 30,000). To compensate the company, KCRW conducted a special-purpose "Save the Music" fund drive both on the air and on their website KCRW.org. Reclaim Media developed a special UPS-based logistics system to safely shuttle all 16,000 records between KCRW's office in Santa Monica and Reclaim Media's digitization factory in Seattle, Washington without losing or damaging a single record.

Reclaim Media's quote to KCRW for this digitizing project was for less than 10% as much money and a quarter the time frame of their competitor Blue Wave Audio in Hollywood. Some at KCRW were unsure at first about just how we could offer a high-quality service for much less money, but were won over by our sound quality, consistency and turnaround time that are only made possible by our years-long commitment to automating the digitization workflow as much as possible.

KCRW (contact: Ron Gonzales, 310-450-5183) remain pleased with our product and were kind enough to refer Canadian station CKUA to us for their digitizing effort for 75,000 CDs and almost 200,000 records!

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