The tremendous amount of 25.000 DAT cassettes needed to be addressed with a dedicated tool.

YLE Finland, a broadcaster which started already in 2002 to look and invest into  NOA systems recently extended their installation with a complete 8 stereo channel DAT ingest system based on specifically NOA adapted SONY R-500 DAT replayers as well as the MediaLector software, which is able to record 8 DAT´s in parallel on one N6073 Windows based host PC.

The system provides – besides a complete algorithmic scan of the presented audio, complete C2 and CRC as well as problematic read zones, which are read out of the specifically adapted SONY R-500 hardware. The throughput of the system is equal to 8x real time, it is expected that 15.000 hours can be digitised within one year.

The system was also chosen from the aspect that DAT is already discontinued and the spare part delivery will get difficult due to the high complexity of DAT replayers.