Toronto AES Bulletin Preview Jan 2001

RADIOLA: Radio Archives Digital Interactive On-Line Archives at CBC

RADIOLA stands for Radio Archives Digital Interactive On-Line Archives. The system was developed by DALET for CBC Radio's English networks. It is a networked software application for manual and automated archiving and recall of audio programming.

CBC Radio Archives, a department in the Broadcast Centre, performs archiving services for the corporation. Particularly in news and current affairs there is a constant need for previously aired material. Finding the right tape, locating the proper audio clip and providing dubs for programmes is labour intensive. RADIOLA will reduce labour costs and improve efficiencies by tying together existing digital audio workstations (DALET) and an existing database of information (Prolog) about archived programs.

In preparing programs for broadcast staff enters text information about the show into the Prolog database. Later, as the audio goes to air on CBC's Radio 1 and Radio 2 networks, RADIOLA examines Master Control's traffic file and then records the desired audio.

Audio is recorded as 4:1 MPEG files to hard drives for online access. These files are eventually automatically transferred to CD-ROM and stored in a 500 disc jukebox for near-online access.

Later when a producer needs to find a particular audio clip they can perform keyword searches on the metadata in Prolog. A list of possible hits is returned. The files can be auditioned on the DALET workstation, trimmed and then copied into a new program. Producers in other locations across the country will be able to access the same database, preview RealAudio files in their web browser. When they find the desired clip a higher resolution version of the file is copied to their workstation for production. All of this is done from the producer's workstation and without anyone in Radio Archives needing to know about it.

Join us at the CBC for our first meeting of the new millennium. Don Davies, RADIOLA System Administrator, CBC Radio Archives, and Tom Holden, Manager, Systems Engineering (Radio), will be on hand to give us a behind the scenes look at and demonstration of this unique audio archiving system.

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Presented by	Don Davies, RADIOLA System Administrator, CBC Radio Archives Tom Holden, Manager, Systems Engineering (Radio)
Date	Tues, 23 Jan 2001
Time	7:30 pm
Place	CBC Broadcasting Centre
Address	205 John Street Between Front and Wellington St. Andrew or Union Subway stations
Please Pre-register	Call National Mail Box at (416) 922-8122
Pre-Meeting Dinner	5:30 pm ACME Bar & Grill @ King and John Streets

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