Hi everyone,
In the past, I have not used any detectors when going through my night
recordings at home (Etna, NY). I have collected my sound data from the
roof-top microphone (Evans-style, with a Knowles microphone element)
piped into my home computer running Raven Pro, recording a continuous
file sequence from start to finish with each file duration equal to 1
minute. The following day, I would browse through the sound file
sequence by hand, again using Raven Pro, looking for sounds of interest.
Once a sound of interest was worth saving, as an example of a good
flight note for species x, or an interesting unidentified species flight
call, I would cut-and-paste that sound file into a new window and save
it with a time-stamped label, uniquely pairing it to the file/time it
was copied from.
Now, this is all fine when you are a single person, operating your own
home station, only recording on those nights which appear to have good
night flights. But, when you begin operating to capture every night from
multiple stations, or you want to really quantify most or all of the
calls that night, the question of data storage and data processing
becomes the big issues.
How do some of you out there collect your sound data?
What tools do you use for browsing sounds?
Do you only use detectors?
Here's a question for probably three people on this list:
What is the difference between the current Raven Pro detector that Mike
Powers provided settings for and the old BirdCast transient detector? Is
there a difference?
Getting back to an earlier posting from Tom Fowler (prior to the bloom
in membership...140+ now!), what kind of equipment do you each use for
recording or listening to your sounds?
I mentioned that I use a variation on the Bill Evans-style flowerpot
microphone. I know that Andrew Farnsworth and Mike Powers use a
microphone, pre-amp, and housing designed by engineers at Bioacoustics
at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, storing their night sounds on flash
memory inside a SoundCache for analysis later, but what do others use?
What are your personal home recording setups like?
What obstacles or limitations have you encountered with your equipment
setups or recordings?
I realize these are a lot of questions, but I wanted to pose these to
the list in order to help initiate discussion along these lines.
Information about Bill Evans's flowerpot design can be found here:
http://www.oldbird.org/ (click on Microphone Design in the left panel)
Information about the Raven software can be found here:
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/raven/RavenOverview.html
Another sound analysis software tool, Syrinx, can be found here:
http://syrinxpc.com/
Thanks and good night listening!
Sincerely,
Chris T-H
--
Chris Tessaglia-Hymes
Listowner, NFC-L
Ithaca, New York
c...@cornell.edu
http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_WELCOME
http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_RULES
--
NFC-L List Info:
http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_WELCOME
http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_RULES
http://www.mail-archive.com/nfc-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html
--
