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Archiving and storage

Archiving and storage

Sep 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Scott Hanley

When you’ve worked in radio for a while, cleaning the basement can be a different kind of chore.

For me, it has meant sorting through boxes and milk crates full of more than 20 years of reel-to-reel tapes of all sizes and formats, cassettes, carts, LPs, 45s, more than a few DATs and even a minidisc or two. Somewhere in there is precious stuff.

Much of what we do in radio is ephemeral � the traffic report, weather and other things that can be important at the moment. But why worry about keeping it forever?

A GM friend at a commercial station with a long legacy said that when you have station history that goes back 50 years or more, nobody really knows what they have. Many stations didn’t save a lot of stuff.

Many stations have extensive archives on analog media that could be transferred to linear digital formats.

Still, some of these treasures have been found, and specials, soundbites and retail products have surfaced as stations and networks celebrate their history and bask in the glow of nostalgia.

Sentiment aside, radio’s intellectual property could be financially valuable in the future � let alone historically important. I would never want to repeat one of the greatest failures to keep tape I could imagine � the loss of nearly all of the tapes of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson from 1962 to 1972. In the midst of some clearly forgettable sketches and interviews were some wonderful gems. Radio has also lost its share of gems.

Quality, quantity and recovery

On a day-to-day basis, the new world of radio is digital storage � on hard drive-based systems, mirrored for redundancy or routinely backed up.

Dolby AC2, MP3 and MP2 coding formats are data-reduced, taking out parts of the audio that can never be recovered. If you are going to use the audio more than once, better to have it sound as perfect as possible. With faster processors and cheaper storage via hard drives, the consensus opinion is to go linear if you can, if possible with 24-bits and 96kHz sampling. If you can’t afford to go linear yet, keep the audio as high quality as you can.

The regularity of stations performing backups ranges from daily to weekly to whenever they please. I spoke with one individual who suggested that general managers stress the importance of backing up the digital treasure by having the operations staff exchange the backup tapes with bookkeeping to receive their paychecks.

Editing, editing, editing

As hard drive storage gets cheaper and cheaper, the bits get cheaper to store, but managing the content can get more complicated. Every day, stations, clusters, groups and networks are making decisions on their digital content management. How much hard drive space your producers, techs or hosts have to use has a direct relationship to with how much of your content they will keep on your system.

If they are squeezed for space, you may hear about it from what you don’t hear, like an award-worthy commercial done for a hard-to-please client that got deleted because there just wasn’t room anymore.

You will always seem to need more space, but sometimes it’s because less-valuable content, work parts, duplicate files and plain junk are taking up space. File maintenance is an important bit of housecleaning to keep the system running well, but it’s also important for the staff to remember what it was that they put there in the first place.

Computer-based logging systems ease the chores of storing, cataloging and retrieving audio files.

Eventually, you will need more digital storage space. The key is to make sure you and your staff know what is in the system that might be so valuable it shouldn’t be erased.

Keeping the old stuff

Religious broadcasters, public radio outlets and some news/talk stations seem more interested in keeping and reusing archival content. Among the networks, news and talk archives seem to be of increasing interest.

The broadcast rules in Canada require compliance logging, mandating stations to keep 30 days of programming. There are computerized loggers that accept multiple feeds. Stations that want to keep the audio longer can transfer the files to some other media type or increase their capacity. The same technology can be used to digitize analog content for the future.

Some networks are interested in archiving for host and actuality content for several years. This adds to the storage capacity requirements. Other legacy issues are a problem, not just for old audio formats, but for data backup systems. Some tape formats for tape backup systems are getting hard to support.

It is best to get everything of value on to some digital format, such as CD-R, at the highest digital resolution possible. While no format can be guaranteed to be timeless, making a periodic digital copy every couple of years will buy some time.

Using what you keep

For use on the air and the Web, there are commercial and non-commercial stations and networks that want to keep every word and program uttered. Keeping years worth of programming is more than a storage issue � it’s a major challenge for finding and reusing the content.

When we turn audio into digital files, we can give it a user-friendly name so we can associate a database file to it. We can put it into categories. For pre-produced content, setting protocols and applying labels may work well but I have a feeling we’re going to miss much of the value of our stored sounds with the need for so much manual intervention.

If we could search audio content the way we search text, the ability to find value in our stored archives could improve dramatically.

Speech recognition and speech-to-text solutions being developed for court reporting and captioning may hold an important solution. For example, Fast-Talk Communications is developing a high-speed audio search engine that has garnered the interest of security analysts and telephone and Internet customer service operations. If that kind of technology can be developed for use by broadcasters, it could turn radio into a searchable treasure trove.

Whatever you store, you must back up. Whatever hardware and software you purchase, it must be replaced. Hard drive space may be cheap, but you will always long for more.

Now, back to the basement. If I can get my hands on a DBX II decoder, I think I have a really valuable tape down there.

Hanley is director and general manager of WDUQ, Pittsburgh.

Thanks to Dave Scott of Scott Studios, Jay Hyrich of OMT Technologies/iMediaTouch and Don Backus of Enco Systems for their help in providing information in preparing this column.

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