I installed Acousmographe yesterday, and I think it's a great program. I was
able to work most of it out because at least the program itself has everything
labelled in English. I can't work out how to move the cursor to play at any
position, so I've been having to use the play direction and speed controls to
get to the spot.
I tried making a short movie and uploading it to Youtube, but unfortunately it
didn't like the Flash file produced (swf, not flv), and when played, the audio
is normal but the video runs straight through to the end and sits there till
the audio finished. I guess I need to convert the swf file to mpg or something
first. Can anyone recommend any software for that - I Googled for some, but
they all sound like scams to me.
Then I tried outputting it as a series of stills, and put it together by hand
with MS Movie Maker. That works fine on Youtube, but I didn't have any way to
add the moving cursor, so you can't tell which part of the sonogram is playing.
Attempt 1 is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cThSV-oYlw
Attempt 2 is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIAjhg7L88g
Both have the wrong aspect ratio for Youtube, so there are black bars down the
sides, but that's my fault for not checking first, not the program.
There doesn't seem to be a way of producing a movie with a fixed cursor and
scrolling sonogram, despite the program being able to do that live. Either I'm
missing something, or they've done that to reduce the size of the movies
produced, and the time taken to produce them. I've seen samples on the web that
do it, but it looks like they've used a screen capture program to record the
program running live, and they're a bit jerky.
I also confirmed with Soundcloud that one can't replace the waveform graphics
with one's own, so David's method of placing the graphics under the original
graphics embedded on one's owe site seems to be the easiest way to deal with
that.
They also confirmed that they have no intention of supporting sonograms, even
if Freesound do. They said it "could lead to a confusing user experience".
Peter Shute
From:
On Behalf Of Marc Myers
Sent: Wednesday, 25 January 2012 12:32 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [Nature Recordists] Nature recordists group
I know I've mentioned it before, but Acousmographe is free and creates great
sonograms and waveforms. These can be annotated or illustrated and exported as
either a series of still images or Flash video (FLV) files. Really a great
program for nothing. Only limitation is for those of us whose language skills
are poor. The documentation is chiefly in French, a subject I failed for four
years plus summer school. Google Translate has been my friend in using this
powerful application.
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