Media Inspector

Media Inspector is a professional airplay-monitoring system. After loading audio (songs, commercials, jingles etc.) and the relevant metadata (artist, title, product, client etc.) into the database, the system uses Advanced Media Fingerprinting techniques to instantly recognize and identify incoming or archived audio. It then presents every occurrence of that audio, together with the song title or advertisement client, in the unique Media Timeline, or in time-based reports.


Adding audio to be recognized is surprisingly easy, add the audio files to the system database with a few mouse-clicks, or jump to unidentified audio bits in the Timeline, mark individual tracks and add the metadata. The system also recognises and presents a list of repeating unrecognised audio, allowing the user to quickly add the proper metadata, or mark it as 'ignore'. From that moment on, Media Inspector will identify every future and past occurrence of that track.


Media Inspector can analyze audio coming from one source, or multiple sources. It can analyze analog and digital, terrestrial and satellite radio, TV and even webstreams. It can compare rotations from several sources at the same time.


Media Inspector runs as an add-on to Media Logger and includes all its logging features.

Sample applications

• automatic playlist generation for radio, television or web-audio
• royalty collection report
• commercial spots rotation verification
• cuts rotation analysis
• competition monitoring
• archive, browse and sample search

How it works

Database creation. There are three simple ways to add audio files that are supported by the Windows Media Player with metadata to the database:

• Point the server to the directories, network drives or external devices that contain these files, the system will automatically import the audio and metadata. It will continue to monitor those directories and will automatically import newly added audio files.
• Manually add files, click 'Add file', select the track and click 'Add'
• Import tracks from Media Logger, using the Media Player.
• We can also create customized filters to retrieve audio tracks from any software.

The audio from the sources you want to analyze is converted directly from the sound card, or from the Media Logger archive to a low bit-rate, pre-processed format, containing all the information needed for searching and identifying, and condensed enough (about 60MB, per day, per source) for transfers by Internet/Intranet.


Search modules (running on one or more PCs) analyze the pre-processed data, and send the results to text log files (for Media Logger, and other applications) and to an SQL database


User can access these results through their Media Player.



 
or through their web browser.

Features and specifications

• Media Inspector uses proprietary audio fingerprinting technology.
• It is fast – dozens of station can be analyzed on one PC.
• The database can hold a hundred thousand songs/commercials/jingles.
• The server works in fully automated mode – users only have to provide descriptions (metadata) for new songs/jingles/commercials etc., no other maintenance is required.
• Access to history logs and detailed reports from web interface, from wherever you are.
• Easy to integrate with station automation and play-out systems.
• Fully scalable, from one PC with one or multiple processors to a complete server farm.
• Fire & forget; After setting the server up once, it needs no further maintenance.
• Direct audio recording from Windows-compatible sound cards.
• Support for Media Logger audio archives.
• Full integration with Media Logger.
• User friendly access to search results from Media Logger – Player.
• Audio import from all popular audio formats – for automated creation of songs/jingles/commercials database.
• Audio used for search can be as short as 0.5sec, and there is no upper length limit.
• Very high recognition percentage, minimal level of false hits and a great tolerance for audio disturbances (like noise, crackling etc.)
• When a new song, commercial or jingle is added to the database, the system can re-search the whole archive for it. Also this search is very fast as only 'non-recognized' parts of the archive will be searched.
• Thanks to multi-point checking of every audio file, partial plays will also be detected. The system can even report which part of the song has been played.
• Reports are available in various forms: from simple history logs listing when songs were played, through detailed reports listing on what stations the song aired, how often, at what time; or which tracks receive the highest rotation in selected times and at selected stations; is the airplay growing or diminishing.
• Export of these reports to external applications (from the web interface)
• We can create additional customized reports and data analysis function on demand.