by ARD, powered by BMAT
Intro
Beginning 1st of July of 2023, DigiBack is solely operated through ARD.
DigiBack is an ARD-owned platform that allows TV and Radio producers to intuitively search for music to use within their audiovisual productions and download it.
Production Music Libraries sign an agreement to share their music and its corresponding metadata with ARD. BMAT then powers up this platform by providing audio files and music metadata.
How to get your music on the DigiBack platform – for Production Music Libraries:
You need to have in place a label agreement with ARD and DeutschlandRadio, plus an agreement on Trailers and Online Productions. o sign up, please contact legal department of SWR: ARD-Labelliste@swr.de
The agreements regulate the use of music for content published online only without prior broadcasting on radio or TV.
As soon as you’ve signed the above agreements, you can write to us at germany-support@bmat.com to kick off. We’ll integrate you as a new Library for DigiBack, and guide you through the transfer of your music.
You’ll need to collect all your audio files in .wav – min. 44,1 kHz, min. 16 Bit – and make sure the metadata is complete with keywords in German or English. Once we get the ARD confirmation, we’ll send you clear guidelines and a metadata template. You’ll also have one of us help you during the whole process of data delivery.
After BMAT has confirmed to you the successful upload into our system, your content will be searchable in DigiBack within the next 24-48 hours.
We are working on this integration and we expect to have it ready in the next months.
You could see some examples here.
You can check this video tutorial to know how the platform looks like, how users search for tracks, filter by keywords and download the audio.
Not yet, but ARD plans to release a new version by the end of the year and they may consider displaying the waveforms.
If the “related tracks” have the same EAN, they are linked to the main track.
No, the current search function doesn’t take into account the weight of the results.
The fields are part of the standard template for BMAT metadata. Since they are not available in DigiBack, they are not transmitted to ARD.
Not all English keywords are translated into German, however, they are recorded. Translations are mostly done for the mood keywords.
For example, if a source sends “mysterious ” or “secretive ” as a keyword, it is translated into “geheimnisvoll” and it is properly assigned (as per the digiBack_ausdruckscharakter.xlsx list). So, when a user searches for “secretive”, the user interface shows the tracks with the keyword = “geheimnisvoll”.
On the other hand, the keywords that DigiBack receives without any translation in the ARD vocabulary, remain in English and are made searchable via free text.
The keywords listed in the provided Excel files (digiBack_ausdruckscharakter.xlsx, digiBack_ausführung.xlsx and digiBack_epoche.xlsx) are the most important ones for ARD and make up to about 25% of all the keywords used by them. DigiBack assigns your keywords to those ones and the unassigned ones are saved in a free text field. The mapping process is the same for every distributor.
Yes, the unassigned keywords are saved as free text and are searchable. For further information, please, see the file Content_Factsheet_DigiBack.pdf.
If you need to update metadata, resend us the new metadata along with the WAV files in the same way you do for the back catalogue and new releases.
If you need an overview of the uploaded content, please, feel free to contact us anytime and we will provide you with a list of all the tracks you have sent us for DigiBack.
“1970er Jahre” is the name convention that ARD uses in DigiBack. Ideally, you should use the same one but in case you provide another format, the text will be saved in the DigiBack database as free text.
The lists contain the most frequently used keywords that ARD producers use to search for music content. There are, however, more keywords as subjects, genres, geographical areas and sound bodies/instruments.