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MPG takes ISRC-in-WAV campaign to wider industry

By | Published on Tuesday 25 June 2013

MPG

The Music Producers Guild last week briefed representatives from various industry bodies about its initiative to get International Standard Recording Codes – the code used to uniquely identify any one sound recording – embedded into WAV files as standard.

As previously reported, the MPG has been calling for better meta-data standards in digital content for a while, though less in terms of providing better data for categorisation purposes (which others have focused on), and more to ensure better crediting for those who work behind the scenes on sound recordings. Partly to ensure that any creator’s moral right of a credit is more readily met, and partly to aid with the reporting of neighbouring right royalties for those session musicians and producers due such a thing under copyright law.

The MPG reckons – probably rightly – that the easiest way to achieve its objective is to link digital music files to the existing ISRC system, which in turn could be linked to any other copyright databases developed down the line. The producers trade body has been working with the European Broadcasting Union in this domain, and is now advocating the adoption of the ‘broadcast WAV’ with embedded ISRC as an industry standard for raw digital files.

Reps from record label trade bodies BPI and AIM, collecting societies PPL and PRS and the Featured Artists Coalition all attended a briefing on the MPG venture last week, launching wider efforts to promote this standard to the industry at large.

Those efforts follow support for the initiative from the technology side of the equation. Barry Grint of Alchemy Mastering, who is leading this campaign for MPG, told CMU: “We have had a great response from digital audio workstation 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 shortly”.



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