Delivering the possibilities of data, Western Digital Corp. announced that the HGST Active Archive System, the first in a family of products to include the ActiveScale™ P100 and X100, is enabling the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to archive more than 17,000 hours’ worth of live music, video, and data from the Montreux Jazz Festival to instantly enjoy, study and interact with the content well into the future. Converted from tape to digital format and stored on the HGST Active Archive System, the performances and supporting data are easily accessible in real-time and on-demand, removing physical and technological barriers, and resulting in substantial research and production workflow improvements at EPFL.
As part of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project, the HGST Active Archive System stores and delivers live video and audio recordings from a variety of concerts dating back to 1967. The recordings span 18 different media formats that were used to capture 11,000 hours of video and 6,000 hours of audio from more than 5,000 concerts. The archive is the most comprehensive collection of live music footage ever created and contains classic performances from Marvin Gaye, Ella Fitzgerald, B.B. King, Johnny Cash, Deep Purple, Eric Clapton, and more, all of whom have performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. In recognition of its 50 years of music and video archiving, the collection was inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World program in 2013.
