birding-aus

Bird Calls

To: birding-aus <>
Subject: Bird Calls
From: Vicki Powys <>
Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 13:19:43 +1100
> On 28/10/01 7:01 pm, "Stanley Jones" <> wrote:
> 
>> I need some advice.
>> 
>> I am teaching myself bird calls using the Bird Observers club tapes. The
>> problem is that finding individual calls is a slow process. I would like to
>> record the calls on my computer hard disk so that I can access individual
>> calls with the click of a mouse. The problem is I don't know how to do this.
>> 
>> Could someone help please?
>> 

The cheapest way to access bird calls from tapes, is to note the number on
the counter of your tape recorder for the start of each species, then you
can return to that number.  There's a lot of winding back and forth of
course, but that's what everyone did before we had CD technology.

The BOCA tapes are not yet available on CD, save for the first tape/CD.  The
Simpson and Day CD Rom can't be played on a Macintosh.  There are no other
complete CD sets available for Australian bird calls.

To put the entire contents of the 12 BOCA tapes onto your hard drive would
require a huge hard drive capacity.  The contents of 12 tapes might take up
8-10 gigabytes.  

Russell Woodford's suggestion that you "get a friend with a CD burner to
transfer the BOCA tapes to CDs for you" might be asking a bit much of them.
I made my own set of CDs from the BOCA tapes and it took me a full week to
do this.   Of course such copying is a breach of copyright, but probably
legal to make one copy for purely personal use.  It would be pushing the
copyright issue if one person began supplying others with CD copies.

If I can burn the set of 12 tapes to CD in one week, BOCA could do the same.
The need for such a set of CDs is immediate, and the quality of the existing
tapes is adequate, so why delay?  Howard Plowright could then aim for an
upgraded set in say, five years time, and meanwhile people could be usefully
using the existing compilation in CD form without breach of copyright.

None of the recordists (including myself) who contributed to the original
BOCA cassette series were paid any royalties for their recordings, and
perhaps BOCA should now recognize the commercial potential of an immediately
available set of CDs.  BOCA might then be able to offer some royalties to
the recordists, if they start making a profit from the sales.

Regarding audio processing with a computer:  you need an audio software
program, then you feed in the sound, say an hour at a time, divide up the
tracks, and burn the CD.  It is not difficult, but it is time consuming.  (I
use an iMac with Peak LE sound software and Toast software for CD burning.
I feed the sound directly into the computer's "audio in" socket.  The
quality is excellent.)

Vicki Powys











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