Media ready for reading-in (sticking together or including damaged / hidden info)
A robot cluster with 11 devices for forensic analysis
backX-Net on the data trail
Reading-in of huge amounts of data stock on CD or DVD - i. e. undertaking data forensics - may mean a lot of work. That is what the Swiss enterprise Replica thought - before it got in touch with X-Net.
What can you do with all these audio CDs? They take up a lot of space but cannot store a lot of music; moreover, they will clutter up your CD collection. Replica, the Swiss company, took issue with this kind of problem and wished to offer a service (at a time when this was legally possible) to create a pristine soundscape and add some useful information.
The company offered customers to convert their music files to the mp3 format, which is a space-saving and all-purpose solution, with the resulting file burned on a medium. To enable Replica to handle the huge data volume, X-Net realised a technically mature solution - one that is simple and elegant at the same time: the efficient conversion is carried out by a system of robot clusters and controlling software, with the additional bonus of considerable cost reductions for our customer.
Music to our ears ...
Software developed by X-Net not only carries out data forensics automatically: it also researches metadata for each file in the web. That way, the software connects addional information such as album titles, singers, musicians etc. with the music data and allows simple and efficient search processes. Clearly, X-Net's background knowledge about automated data detection was helpful for the development of this system.
The advantages of the robot framework are there for anyone to see: given the all-embracing complete system and thanks to the processes developed by X-Net, it is possible to edit, convert and burn several CDs simultaneously. A camera (assembled and placed on the robot) shoots photographs of each cover, to get and confirm explicit identification. As a result, data can be related to the right media afterwards.
What's more, the system saves and collects all data in a central storage device, which allows unproblematic, rapid and reliable access to these data. For our clients the Replica company, that meant first-class data security for their valuable collections of music.
