on 3/10/03 10:35 PM, Walter Knapp at wrote:
Walt,
Perhaps you're right. Raven is really designed as a sound analysis tool for
scientists and may not cater to the needs of us nature sound recordists.
The big feature I'm hoping will be included in Raven is the ability to make
decent Log 2 sonograms (you probably remember all my posts about this last
year). They were supposed to include this feature, but I see no mention of
it on the web site.
I still feel that a log 2 representation will produce a sound-picture that
more closely resembles the way we hear, which is in octaves. An arithmetic
sonogram stretches the highs and is misleading to the eye.
Lang
Lang Elliott wrote:
> The ultimate sonogram software will soon be available, but for a whopping
> $400. It is called Raven and is being produced by the Cornell Laboratory =
of
> Ornithology. It will be available later this month for Windows and someti=
me
> this summer for Mac OS X:
>
> http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/Raven.html
I've been watching this one, and it will be nice to see it finally out.
So far what's been shown for sonograms is not all that impressive, not a
lot of improvement over Canary. I'm waiting for the details. It is a
huge amount of money for just a sonogram program, so one can hope there
is a pretty full featured sound editor with appropriate filters for
nature recording included. I doubt it's going to be running any of the
standard sound plugin formats, so it's going to have to have it all
onboard.
It is cheaper than Spark XL. I mostly use sonograms while filtering, or
at least that's the most detailed use for me on a routine basis. Spark
XL allows me to have a pretty detailed realtime sonogram while playing
the sound and adjusting the filters. It has the capability of arranging
a set of filters into a large complex to run simultaneously. The ability
to do this allows adjusting the interactions of filters and not only
listening, but seeing the effects on the sonogram as I go. This is quite
different from just studying a single call on a fixed sonogram, which is
what Raven appears to be designed for. And on top of that Spark XL will
run quite a few standard sound filter plugin formats. Making the list of
available filters large.
Raven might be useful for display sonograms for webpages. Almost have to
try it to tell. Display sonograms are a different game from working
sonograms. It is a little worrying that all their screen displays show
the same, fairly narrow window for the sonogram graphic.
I don't think it will be the ultimate sonogram software for me. Though
it might be useful. Particularly if it has some of the more detailed
sonogram settings, ones too intensive for the realtime sonograms of
Spark XL. The stuff for picking apart the small details of single calls.
I want to see a lot more specs, and preferably a demo or so. See what
happens when I feed it some of my files.
Note in the Future Versions page they are apparently currently keeping
the entire soundfile in memory, and only future versions can support
bigger files than memory. Most all the software we use is set up to
buffer bigger files than fit in memory, it's been a long time since I
used a memory limited sound program. And it's a little surprising that
sample rate conversion has been left to the future, even very cheap
sound software can do this. It is nice to see that someday the color
pallet of the sonograms might be fully editable.
As I've noted, sound software reflects the interests of the group
developing it. This does definitely give the feel of something developed
for Bioacoustics research and their publications. Which is hardly the
full scope of nature recording, or even it's primary focus anymore. It
also seems dated, a fairly good program for when they started developing
it, but sound software has evolved a lot in the last few years.
Walt
Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service
<http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/> .
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
|