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Re: Sound editing & sonogram software on PC

Subject: Re: Sound editing & sonogram software on PC
From: Walter Knapp <>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 22:50:55 -0500
Rich Peet wrote:
> I keep mine at 96 db so that you see what the ambient noise really 
> is.  Where you set it, maybe or may not be what your mics can give an 
> indication of, but mine don't see 150 db. I try to match the display 
> at the min. base level of the mic so that they are matched with what 
> I hear.  I can then hear the wind at the same point that I see the 
> wind.  It sort of depends what you make sonograms for.  I use it only 
> as a visual judge of how good I did on any recording. Not what people 
> would visualize the sound best as.

This is, indeed something that may not have been made clear in this 
discussion. It is significantly different how I'd set up a sonogram on a 
webpage to illustrate the call of a frog for the reader. I try to make 
those as clear as possible, only the call. So even entirely 
non-technical folks have a chance.

But, when I'm hanging the sonogram on the end of my filter stack, I want 
to see all the boggles and warts. I generally don't do anything to make 
the sono display better. I want to remove that stuff with the filters, 
so it's really removed. The sono is verification of exactly what the 
filters are doing, or not doing.

Or, if not filtering, I want to see it all to think about what happened. 
Or maybe to look for the faint background calls in the background fuzz.

So, if you are making webpages you might be interested in clear ones 
like on my webpages. But for your own work you don't really want that. 
The ones on my webpages each individually took a bit of work getting the 
settings just right and so on. I suppose I could have just taken a usual 
one and gone into photoshop and "cleaned it up", but I prefer not to do 
it that way. They are the output as I got it from the Soundhack program.

On the business of setting the dB range, I have found the ability to set 
the range in Spark XL useful only occasionally. Sometimes you can 
resolve a call better by twiddling with that. I probably use adjusting 
the frequency range more often, to better resolve what's going on in 
some frequency band.

Walt




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