A system and method for reading a magnetic medium having a data band thereon, the data band comprising a plurality of written data tracks and in some embodiments at least one alignment band. The system in one embodiment includes a plurality of adjacent readers for simultaneously reading the data tracks, at least some of the readers overlapping multiple data tracks. At least one reader is also present for reading the at least one alignment band. A mechanism determines a fractional overlap of each reader on the data tracks based on readback of the alignment band. A mechanism extracts data from readback of the data tracks based at least in part on the fractional overlap.