The National Library of Australia installs CEDAR Cambridge
Mark Piva (Manager, NLA Sound Preservation and Technical Services), Kevin Bradley (Director, NLA Sound Preservation and Technical Services) and Gordon Reid (Managing Director, CEDAR Audio).
16 August 2012
CEDAR Audio has concluded several years of consultation and development by completing the sale and supply of the first CEDAR Cambridge V8 system to the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The system was installed and commissioned by Peter Orehov of CDA Professional Audio in Sydney together with CEDAR's Managing Director, Gordon Reid, who travelled from the UK to Canberra to train the Library's audio engineers in its use.
Reid didn't need any directions to find the NLA or even the studios within it because he has been visiting the staff in the Library since the mid-90s, obtaining their views on existing CEDAR products and how these could be developed to best fit their workflow and other requirements. He said, "When I'm talking to libraries and archives holding huge collections, I have to keep in mind that the audio restoration process must synchronise with existing procedures as well as excel at cleaning the sound. The NLA has 45,000 hours of recordings in its oral history and folklore collection, so they not only have to be able to digitise and restore as efficiently as possible at the highest quality possible, they also need to be able to keep track of every file and its processing history."
"We've been talking to [the NLA's Director of Sound Preservation and Curator of Oral History and Folklore] Kevin Bradley and his team for many years about how they work and, perhaps even more importantly, how they would prefer to work, and this has given us a firm understanding of the facilities that they need. Their feedback in 2005 was instrumental in our development of CEDAR Cambridge's metadata facilities, and in 2008 they helped us to specify its Report Generator, which generates HTML and XML reports that fully describe what has been done to the audio, complete with parameter tables and graphics. Of course, designing, developing and testing significant upgrades such as these can take years rather than months, but they are now available for every CEDAR Cambridge system."
Kevin Bradley added, "One big feature that drew us to CEDAR Cambridge was Respeed - it's incredible. We have a lot of material that was recorded on tape machines built in the 1950s, and these can increase in speed in a non-linear fashion as the tape is played. With Respeed, we can make things that were previously unintelligible, intelligible. Another critical concern for us is the information regarding the processes that went into creating the audio as well as identifying the content, and CEDAR fits very nicely into our database structures."
Peter Orehov of CDA Professional Audio concluded, "As a high-end distributor, it's very important to us to work with suppliers who foster strong, long-term customer relationships and who understand what's needed to support government institutions and larger commercial organisations. CEDAR continually demonstrates its competence in this area with things like its update policy, which is still free of charge, yet the company provides all of its users with new revisions of their software whenever these are released. That's extremely rare, and hugely appreciated by our customers."
About CEDAR Cambridge V8
CEDAR Audio leads the world in the field of audio restoration and speech enhancement. In addition to thirty restoration modules and other audio processes, the latest version of CEDAR Cambridge permits simultaneous video playback of up to eight A/V files while analysing and processing the audio within them. It handles sample rates of up to 192kHz, and offers enhanced versions of many of its modules, together with numerous architectural updates.
Whether users are engaged in audio remastering, post, restoration for archives and libraries, or audio forensic investigation, CEDAR Cambridge offers them unparalleled capabilities and quality.
See: CEDAR Cambridge product pages
For further information 
CDA Professional Audio, Unit 5, 79 Bourke Road, Alexandria, NSW 2015, Australia
t: +61 2 9330 1750 · e: info@cda-proaudio.com · w: www.cda-proaudio.com