Memnon Archiving Services Achieves One-Half Million Audio Digitized Recordings

NOA Audio Solutions announced that Brussels-based Memnon Archiving Services S.A. has digitized one-half million audio recordings relying on NOA systems. Memnon customers include Danish Radio, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), the British Library, Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroep (VRT), and the European Parliament.

NOA systems support multiple Memnon projects, including migration of 250,000 digital audio tapes for Danish Radio and 350,000 CDs for BnF. Memnon has elected to rely on NOA over competing systems because NOA’s Job Database is capable of managing 60 stereo channels in a single central workflow solution. In addition, the failsafe quality assurance of the NOA JobDatabase instantly identifies a problem on a device and then enables an operator to find and fix quickly and easily any content that might have been affected.

"NOA is for me the ‘Google’ of digitizing within an archiving workflow," said Nicolas de Beco, operation and quality assurance director at Memnon. "Like finding a needle in a haystack, NOA enables us to search and find errors within thousands of performance recordings. And because results are managed in a central database workflow solution, it only takes a few clicks to reorganize the workflow and mitigate the problem."

With offices and studios in Belgium and Sweden, Memnon is a leader in European archiving. Its multidisciplinary team of sound engineers, computer specialists, and documentation experts has more than 15 years of experience working with sound technology throughout Europe. The company offers a range of services for sound archives as well as audio digitization, restoration, indexing, and segmentation of sound archives.

"Since we acquired our first NOA system in 2003, we have continued to partner with the company and have integrated their systems within our own production asset management platform for most sound carriers," said Michael Merten, Memnon managing director. "The integration of NOA solutions within Memnon’s platform has allowed us to achieve high efficiency and impressive output at the highest quality, with low administrative work."

At Memnon, NOA MediaLector ingest tools perform quality controlled mass migration of DATs and CDs under control of the NOA Job Database workflow system. NOA MediaLector software running on the N6073 host is capable of transferring eight stereo sources in parallel with up to 24-bit, 44.1-kHz/48-kHz quality. Additionally, MediaLector constantly monitors the status of the DAT drives’ error correction stages and annotates the quality-relevant status data synchronously to the audio stream with Sony PCM 7040 and NOA-adapted R500 DAT. The result is a thoroughly documented audio transfer with a digitization proof stamp written to the database along with the audio material.