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Digitizing and preserving multitrack tapes in Yle

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Yle, The Finnish Broadcasting Company, has utilized analog and digital multitrack tapes for decades as working material. While multitrack tape use has discontinued, their archival and content preservation work is ongoing. This document outlines how we developed a new multitrack digitization/transfer system from scratch. We also present some of the challenges faced with our multitrack tapes. One of the biggest challenges was to restore old machines and other multitrack gear to operational condition. We also had to develop a system to wrap all needed data and tape related documents for our digital archives. We started the multitrack process by checking out samples of recordings from different decades to see how they had survived. While we found that analogue tapes had survived well, some of our digital DASH-tapes (BASF 931 and its derivatives) suffered from binder related problems.

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