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Largest Public Radio Vinyl Records Digitization Project Completed

Public radio station widens their music variety by transferring 16,000 analog vinyl records to hi-fi digital audio files in twelve months.

KCRW radio station in Santa Monica, CA had a problem. Their listeners especially enjoyed the variety of KCRW's music programming, but only a small portion of their music library ever went on the air. The rest was on vinyl records, difficult to access and play, and incredibly time-consuming for new DJs to browse and discover. The solution was digitizing. Reclaim Media in Seattle, WA built an automated factory to transfer 16,000 vinyl records to hard drives in twelve months at 95% less cost than their nearest competitor. The project is complete and KCRW's entire music library is now instantly searchable and playable to their programmers and DJs.

"The KCRW project was good for us because it forced us to think at a higher level. Sixteen thousand records is just too many to feed through a system that has bugs, quirks or exceptions," said Craig Meyer, President, Reclaim Media.

Variety is one critical reason why public radio's music programming stays unique and valuable to listeners. While commercial stations focus on drilling home an ever-narrower weekly rotation of Top 40 or even Top 20 hits, public radio explores whole genres and eras to which audiences would otherwise never be exposed. Variety gives public radio listeners a sense of surprise and discovery when they hear music for the first time that they'd never find at big-box music stores like WalMart or Best Buy, or online music outlets like iTunes or Rhapsody.

KCRW's music library already houses a huge variety of music spanning dozens of genres and even languages, but accessing it was costly because it was essentially "locked up" on vinyl.

Every individual record had an enthusiastic champion at one time when it was submitted to the library, but remained unknown to almost everyone else, especially after the record's champion has moved on. Over time, a greater proportion of KCRW's 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, including KCRW.

"Those kinds of records are orphans. The DJs who knew and loved them most have gone away, and now they're almost anonymous," Craig Meyer said.

But no longer. KCRW chose Reclaim Media to digitize their record library after sampling their audio quality and receiving a second bid from a non-automated firm in nearby Hollywood for twenty times as much money.

"We were shocked to learn how much more a competitor wanted to do the exact same thing," said Ryan Purcell, Senior Business Development, Reclaim Media.

Reclaim Media built a custom-engineered computer-automated record-digitizing factory that digitized 300 of KCRW's records every workday. Sixteen Technics SL-1200 turntables, a standby for DJs and broadcasters, were disassembled and modified for computer control. Their play-speed of 33 or 45 RPM and stopping and starting functions are entirely controlled by computer. A record-washing station was added to remove the dust and dirt from each record and prevent the "pop" and "crackle" distortion for which vinyl records are notorious.

"We calculated that it would take us nine years to hire someone to do this in-house. Reclaim Media had a much more acceptable figure. The first 7,500 records took them roughly three months," said Ron Gonzales, Systems Administrator, KCRW.

UPS safely shuttled the 16,000 records, 80 at a time in custom-engineered cases, to Reclaim Media's facility in Seattle and back to KCRW in Santa Monica. Not a single one was lost or damaged.

The music data was delivered in WAV for the audio and XML for artist, album and track title information formated on hard disk drives.

To show its commitment to public radio stations, Reclaim Media allows their customers to support their favorite stations. Customers can select a public radio station to receive 10% of the cost of their order as an in-kind donation of conversion services to that station.

Reclaim Media was founded in 2002 to perform analog to digital audio conversion services quickly and affordably through custom process automation. Their website, www.ReclaimMedia.com, offers and describes a range of custom services as well as articles relevant to audio conversion.

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If you'd like more information or to schedule an interview, please contact Lena Baisden, Director of Public Relations, at 206/380-8030 or 206/779-4842, or email her directly at Lena@ReclaimMedia.com.

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