Our Physical Music Library currently contains 3 million tracks, on CD or vinyl. Our Digital Music Library stores the best of these, perfectly digitised and meticulously catalogued, together with a high-quality image of the cover artwork.
Our Commercial Music catalogue has been compiled over 35 years by Phil Swern. It includes the complete UK Top 40 since 1952, the majority of the US Hot 100 since 1954, and substantial amounts of non-chart Pop, Jazz, Country, Classical, and Film Soundtracks. In addition, our catalogues include 75,000 recordings from the world's best Production Library Music companies.
The Digital Music Library has extensive search facilities to find and retrieve recordings including unique mechanisms to run batch searches and retrievals for 1000s of recordings at a time. These facilities together with media streaming and download capabilities enable us to offer an unrivalled range of products and services.
Meticulous Cataloguing
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At Broadchart we respect the work of the open standards organisations and have adopted the informal ID3v2 standard for cataloguing and tagging our audio files. The ID3v2 standard offers a flexible way of storing audio meta information within the audio file itself. |
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Currently our Commercial Music is catalogued using the ID3v2 frames for Song Title, Artist Name, Album Title, Track Number, Release Year, and Genre. Our cataloguers initially enter the information from the CD or vinyl jewel case. This is then verified and refined by our senior cataloguers. The resulting information is then batch verified against our existing database and corrected if necessary. Only then is the meta information added to our database. Perfect DigitizationWhen we digitize music, we respect the effort and expense that the producers have put into the creation of their products. With this in mind, the first part of our digitization process is to capture a perfect disk image of the contents of a CD or vinyl disc. |
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In the case of a CD, this includes all of the sub-channels which can contain information such as the ISRC and MCN, as well as any collateral material included on the CD (eg photos and video clips). From this perfect disk image, we can produce any basic file format (Raw PCM, Wave, AIFF, AU, SND) or encoded file format (MP3, MPEG-4/AAC, OGG, WMA, RM, MOV, 3GPP/AMR, GSM etc.) that is required. |
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CDs will occasionally (15%) have a fleck of dust, a fingerprint, a scratch or just be faulty. This stops the CD-ROM drive from correctly reading the sequence of audio sectors on the CD. However, our digitization software can automatically adjust the angle of the laser to the CD or reduce the speed of the CD-ROM drive to overcome these problems. This ensures that we have captured a disk image as perfect as the original glass master from which the CD was manufactured. This process resolves the majority of the errors automatically, without which the quality of the final audio is compromised. However, 2% of CDs will have one or more sectors (1 sector = 1/75 second) which are still unreadable. In these circumstances, the digitization software logs an error message detailing which sector was unreadable to enable our sound engineers to either repair the fault using our Pro-Tools editing suite or exclude the track containing these faults from the digital library. |
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