Japanese Version of NetMix Pro from Sakura Notes

At broadcasting stations and in studios, CDs and music libraries continue to multiply.

The walls of a station's CD room are lined with tens of thousands of compact discs, and the actual number of discs that are brought into the studios is quite large. Lugging paper bags stuffed full of compact discs from studio to studio is heavy work. There's also a limit on how much space can be made available inside a station's CD room, raising the question: How does one go about storing and managing the CDs, which will only continue to multiply? Given this situation, what can now be expected to attract attention are music libraries that use hard disc storage.

At this year's exhibition (Booth No.2204), a company called Sakura Notes is introducing a Japanese version of NetMix Pro, music library management software.

This software makes it easy to search through, edit and manage digital music libraries and QuickTime video libraries.

The audio files are handled as WAV data with quality ranging up to 24bit, 192kHz. You can search for files of music and sound effects using the title, artist name, mood, genre, and instrument. For example, you can use a Boolean search to find matches for such keywords as "breezy" and "piano". When looking for background music, this is handy for finding tracks that suit the program concept. It will no doubt prove useful on those occasions when you've forgotten both the name of the track and the artist.

You can synchronize a QuickTime video clip with a chosen track, and you can drag & drop selected/edited audio files directly onto the application timeline of Pro Tools or Avid.

Also, you can create unique folders for individual programs or directors.

For instance, you can pick several tracks as background music for a particular part of a program, and then later - when you have more time - edit your selection. If you don't erase the folder, it can prove handy in future when you're trying to remember what tracks were played on a particular date: just open the relevant program folder and there they are.

Library size for the current version of Net Mix Pro is 2000 compact discs and about 50,000 tracks. In future, I think production staff will be probably looking for higher figures. Furthermore, an important criterion will be just how many tracks from commercially available CDs are going to be included in these libraries. That's because in the studio what is being selected is not so much background music but regular tracks.

J-POP, pop, rock, jazz, ballads - when all tracks from all genres find their way into music libraries, then perhaps CDs will disappear from the studios, and even from the stations.

(Mitsuru Nomura , radio director)