ORF Purchases NOA CD-Lector and MediaButler Archiving Gear

NOA Audio Solutions announced
that Austrian public service broadcaster Öesterreichischer Rundfunk (ORF) has
purchased four ingestLINE CD-Lector CD-grabbing systems and several actLINE MediaButler
processors.

ORF, which will begin using the new NOA equipment in September,
will use the new systems to digitize its legacy CD library at its Vienna and regional
stations. 

ORF will add four CD-Lector systems to gain a total of 20
parallel lines for high-speed CD digitization. The MediaButler tool will enable
the systems to produce different resolutions on the fly, from resampled 48-kHz
BWF files to MPEG-1L2 and FLAC files. Both CD-Lector and MediaButler will
operate as an extension of NOA’s jobDB workflow generator and will integrate
with ORF’s two existing NOA Record systems, which are already installed in the
ORF facilities and connected to ORF’s main audio archiving system, KoKo.

"We’ve had good success with our two NOA Record
workstations over the past four years, having digitized more than 76,000 tapes
with an acceptable human effort," said Harald Lessnig, senior engineer,
Broadcast Systems at ORF. "Now that we need to tackle digitizing around
150,000 CDs, we decided to extend the jobDB workflow system with four CD-Lector
systems from the ingestLINE and actLINE product lines."

CD-Lector is a mass CD-ripping system that can handle up to
eight parallel streams. Designed to extract audio from CDs and convert into
digital audio objects with perfect control over interpolation, CD-Lector can
deliver optimal results even for heavily damaged items. In most cases,
digitization requires no hands-on operation. With the addition of MediaButler,
a tool from NOA’s actLINE product line, the systems can actively retranscode
files from linear format to many other formats.

"A demo proved that CD-Lector integrates simply and
easily with our existing main audio archiving system, which allows for
track-split and partial concatenated extraction of our legacy CD archives, with
practically no programming effort," said Christian Sodl, team leader,
Production and Continuity at ORF. "That flexibility is one of the most
important factors to us."