Martyn Stewart wrote:
> (It is a DNR fundraiser, profits will be put directly into the non-game
> research fund. I'm not making a cent off this. It will be sold through
> one of their wildlife preserve stores, and maybe elsewhere. I'll give
> the details when I know them as to ordering and so on.
>
> Hopefully you will like the narrator.)
>=20
> How much of the recordings are done with the Portadisk are the
> recordings done over an expanse of time using old archives too? You're a
> passionate bloke Walt and a near perfectionist so I'm sure this will be
> a great CD, The things that you should keep in mind is if these
> recordings are palatable to the human ear, why change the recorder? You
> know what, I love my Portadisk and if anyone took it away from me I
> would be devastated, I remember when Minidisk came out when I was in
> Europe, it was the general thought that this would flop with the
> competition from Dat. Minidisk got slatted because of its Compressed
> format and 0f course all the benchmarks came out to clarify the points
> but the format is second to none. If you get the same quality as you or
> I get from the Flash card why change, I think the only reason would be
> because the big boys are leaning that way but I can't see it as progress
> just a money making process...
> I look forward to the CD....
Of the stuff of mine, which is most of it, about 2/3 is Portadisc with
the Telinga Pro V. Some material is older, it all depended on when I'd
found a good bunch of a particular species. Before the Portadisc, the
recorder I used was the Sony MZ-R30 minidisc. A few clips used my older
mono homemade parabolic, and there are even a few calls from the first
mic I tried on frogs, a Shure BG4.1. Everything in the ID's is fairly
heavily filtered to isolate the species wanted, we wanted to have only
the species call and no others and no noise. Did not completely achieve
that.
The chorus material is all stereo from the Telinga Pro V. Most is
Portadisc, but some is the MZ-R30. I prepped well over 100 tracks and we
sorted it down.
For me, it all sounds not the best. I can hear every error, know
everything I could not get quite right. Comes from doing the work, I was
buried in this stuff for months. But, all the folks who are thoroughly
familiar with the calls down here think it's excellent. Often I'd give
John two or three choices of a particular track filtered different ways
and he'd have a hard time even hearing the difference that was so
obvious to me. I doubt you could sift anything better out of what was
basically scientific survey recordings.
The oldest part of it goes back 6 years now, and the most recent was
recorded last summer. In sorting I had all I'd ever recorded on a hard
disk, and would start from the most recent. I'd only go as far back as I
had to. Usually I'd start from a couple dozen tracks for a ID clip, if I
had that many. Then start trying calls against each other. Trying to get
as much variety as 20 seconds can contain.
Note that the few recordings from others are mostly not digital. The
Hydrophone recorded calls in the Gopher frog ID clip were recorded with
a froglogger to cassette. The Brimley's arrived from the researcher on
cassette and was the original tape. A few others in the ID's are
cassette too. I processed all the audio from those too, using my Sony
cassette deck from my living room stereo to get them digitized in the
computer. I sure don't use that deck much anymore. Note that ID clips
were targeted at 20 seconds, and may contain calls from as many as 5
separate recordings, though most are only 2 or 3. I do have a master
list of what I used. I believe John put in the counties in the booklet.
I should clarify, I'm interested in and keeping track of the solid state
recorders as part of always being prepared. If my portadisc was run over
by a truck tomorrow, I'd buy another and be glad they were still
available. But you can never predict when a recorder will go away, so I
watch all options, I always want to have a plan on the back burner.
Right now my two well worn MZ-R30's are my backup as I could use the MP2
to feed them. I have no plans to move to solid state, probably not until
forced to. I assume in time that minidisc will go away.
Walt
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