Posted by: "Thomas Ashcraft"
> I am hoping still for further possibilities from others on the list as
> well. I don't see much discussion of spectrogram programs on this list
> in general. It sure is helpful to visualize sound.
As a trained biologist I learned about sonograms as part of my graduate
school work. In those days you smoked a piece of paper and put it on a
drum where the sonograph scratched out the pattern from a few seconds of
sound. It's much simpler now, or more complex as you have choices.
I've long advocated always analyzing your recordings with sonograms, and
also analyzing again any time you do any processing. In SparkXL which I
use when filtering a recording I always tack on their realtime sonogram
at the end of the filter set to see what changes I made.
> And maybe turning the spectrogram specimens into movies is not
> common. ??
It's only fairly recently become generally available. Soundhack, which I
mentioned has had it for a while but it was the only one I knew that
directly calculated the movie. Even screencapture, particularly with
sound is pretty new.
You got me started on checking current options. Is this the sort of
thing you have in mind? (for those on a slow connection it's 1.3meg,
sorry I could not get it any smaller without even more blurring of the
sonogram) It's a 30 second frog clip, several species.
http://wwknapp.home.mindspring.com/SparkXLScreenSnapz001.mov
You can hear and see the sonogram, just as I use them. The one shown is
log scaled. I can adjust the frequencies covered and the dB range
covered for more detailed looks. This is a fullscale one.
The software I settled on after trying several was Snapz Pro X 2.03.
It's a rather advanced screen capture tool for mac and is shareware. You
can download the software and try it for 30 days if you can stand it's
nagging. I bought it as I have need of complex screen dumps in several
uses. My only complaint is that it only seems to offer lossless
compression for the sound part which makes the files large. Since that
part is actually done by Quicktime pro I may just be missing something.
You can capture anything going on in the whole screen or a selected
area, with or without sound, or even with microphone narration.
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
Note there is a version for OS 9 users.
Walt
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