Steve Pelikan, you wrote,
> the question of archiving recordings so that future researchers can
> learn about and get access to them and get the associated data is a
> significant one. The current best approach I know of is to donate or
> make plans to donate to one of the acoustics archives associated
> with a university or museum. Many have long-term plans to protect
> their data. In this context of future researchers, detailed field
> notes about the recording might be even more valuable than the 2x or
> 4x samples. I've often though of adopting a scheme to put data
> =3Dpossibly large bits of text, photos, other documentation- into the =
> sound file itself. Something like RIFF would let us do that, I guess.
I agree, archiving in an institution with useful metadata is the most
valuable thing we can do. No one will listen to a recording unless
they know what's on it.
I'm trying to figure out how to create a workflow for efficiently
annotating long unattended recordings. I'd like to be able to scan a
spectrogram of the whole file, drop markers with text labels, and then
automatically produce a table of contents from the markers that gives
the position of each marker in absolute time from the beginning of the
file. I think this text data could be saved back to the header of
the .wav file so it would be self-documenting. I'd like it to be able
to show all channels summed or multiple channels in parallel. And do
it on a Mac.
For years I've been using markers in Pro Tools, but they have no legs;
they are only good in Pro Tools. Pro Tools has no spectrogram display,
and the markers can't be printed out, or referenced to the start of
the file.
iZotope Rx gives me a nice spectrogram of the file, and has markers,
but the markers have to be edited in a separate step and can't be
exported or printed.
Soundtrack Pro might be able to do something like this, but when I
loaded an hour-long stereo file and switched to spectrogram display,
it took a long time to calculate the spectrogram and then it took
forever to do -anything-, even to pull down the help menu! This is on
a Mac Pro with four processors. I had to give up.
Suggestions?
-Dan Dugan
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