But this is the reality at DT Productions, which recently passed the 50,000 mark for its digitised audio tracks and which also has 30,000 videos encoded into mpeg and Windows media.

“We now have six full-time staff working on our library, encoding on average 100 new videos and 200-plus audio tracks a month,” said Simon Davis, Director of DT Productions (pictured in the library).

“We keep the masters in a fire-protected room and the encoded library occupies an ever-expanding rack of hard drives.”

DT Production’s library of tracks and videos is used for customers worldwide for jukebox content and the library team carefully selects the tracks that best suit the requirements of the individual sites.

“The biggest challenge of the job is cataloguing the audio and video that we encode,” said Lee Taylor, music programme manager at DT Productions.

“We add tags to each encoded file with various data and are very thorough as it is extremely important. If a customer wants Welsh psychedelia from the 60s or Philly soul from the 70s we need to be able to find it.”

Taylor and his team work closely with the record labels that supply DT Productions with pre-release tracks before they are available in the shops.

“We need to pick up on those buzzes in the music industry,” said Taylor. “Some of our jukebox customers want to have an edge and if we program in some tracks which our experience tells us are destined to be big, then people know they can rely on us to be ahead of the game.

“At the moment the hot tip is Lily Allen but we also predicted that bands like Kaiser Chiefs and Kasabian would be big. We literally hand-pick the tracks on our updates. It’s what gives us that edge.”

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