MPG launches ‘ISRC in Broadcast WAV’ initiative

The Music Producers Guild has officially rolled out its ‘ISRC in Broadcast WAV’ campaign.

It presented the technology and its benefits to senior industry representatives at the Hospital Club in London on Friday (June 21st 2013).

Among those attending the launch were Mark Douglas, CTO of PPL; Geoff Taylor of BPI; James Farrelly of AIM; Keith Hill, head of operations at PRS and Fiona McGugan of MMF/FAC.

The WAV format has become the de-facto standard for music interchange in the production process. However, MPG members were frustrated that there was no method of embedding industry standard ISRC information in the format to enable the content of files to be more accurately identified. The European Broadcasting Union has created a professional version of the WAV format called Broadcast WAV, and MPG has worked with them to enable the carriage of ISRC information in this file type.

MPG will promote the Broadcast WAV standard with embedded ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) information to UK labels and internationally, with a view to it becoming the normal means of delivering recordings to labels, distributors and aggregators. The inclusion of ISRC information will remove the need for it to be re-entered and reduce the opportunity for error.

Alchemy Mastering’s Barry Grint, who has led the MPG ISRC campaign, said: “We have had a great response from DAW manufacturers, many of whom are backing this initiative. Magix/Sequioa and Merging/Pyramix have already demonstrated file exchange between their systems and Prism Sound/SADiE plan to implement this.”

Paul Jessop (executive director, International ISRC Agency) explained the importance of ensuring that ISRC was correctly associated with recordings all the way from the mastering studio to royalty management systems, and stressed the importance of carrying the code with the recording in its initial carriage out of the studio.

Ray Staff (Air Studios, MPG) added that this is the first of a number of technical initiatives planned by the MPG.

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