L to R: Frank Lockwood; Rob Poretti — Toronto AES Section -- June 2017.
Frank Lockwood introduced Rob Poretti and provided some his background. Rob started his professional career as a tape, record and CD mastering engineer at McClear Place Studios. In additions to mastering, Rob's professional audio background includes music production, audio post-production and music recording. He also has extensive IT background including network & storage technologies, software development, database systems metadata related to library sciences. He's been Cube-Tec's partner in the North American market for over 15 years.
Rob presented an overview of current technologies used in media archiving, focusing on legacy audio formats. He began with stating there are millions of hours of archives that almost no one will listen to. There is a science to selecting what to archive.
He went to over Cube-Tec's history, products and developments. In addition to restoration tools, the growing number of archives require management methods. They developed the first 64 bit tools for restoration.
He then went over the workflow in archiving and Cube-Tec's role in that process: the 'Ingest' portion has import modules for popular legacy formats, 'Workflow' includes management and supervision software, and 'Post-Process' offer media batch processing with a user interface to create workflow processes.
Most archives typically don't do restoration, but concentrate mainly on preservation. Manual QC is still performed. The automated process alerts users to possible problems.
Quadriga is the digitization system. He discussed how the software is operated. The audio interface is provided by RME.
Dobbin is a media file and metadata automation system that allows for creating adaptive and dynamic processes. The tool set encompasses content analysis, processing, file conversion, file security, and file encode/decode and transcoding. It allows operators to create workflows, supervise current jobs, view reports, and listen to the results.
Some questions followed with topics including phase correction for reverse tape recording, and wow-and-flutter correction.
After the break Rob played several videos demonstrating the software in use by various organizations, such the Library of Congress.
Some more questions followed with topics covering archive storage and processes, reliability, and formats.
Archiving is an active process. It includes preservation and curation as well as access with web servers. Library sciences are big on databases. With new information being created every day it never stops.
At the close of the meeting, Frank presented Rob with a Toronto AES certificate of appreciation and coffee mug.
