The earliest digital audio restoration systems were extremely slow, requiring many hours to process even the shortest audio tracks. Furthermore, they existed before modern networked audio systems were developed. The advent of real-time audio restoration made it possible to apply processes during ingestion, as part of a processing loop, or upon delivery to another medium, and stand-alone restoration units made these processes easily portable from one location to another. More recently, modern computer-based audio systems have made it possible to integrate audio processing of many kinds with other functions including ingestion, metadata generation and audio distribution across local area networks.

This presentation will outline the latest advances in processing models, and demonstrate how these complement modern audio networking systems. We will show how a single audio restoration system can carry out multiple jobs simultaneously, as well as providing simultaneous restoration capabilities to multiple users across a network within a library or archive. Ways in which these facilities can be applied in diverse areas such as audio forensic investigation as well as traditional audio archives will be discussed.