I ended up using sox, the command line audio program, to dump the image. Not
quite as good as some of the other programs I tried, but it has the advantage
that I have full control of the scales, and I can now probably automate the
whole process.
It will only create an image a maximum of 5000 pixels wide (3 minutes at the
scale I chose), so I had to join dozens of them together, but that can be
automated too. The program authors have agreed to increase it to 200,000 pixels
in the next release, probably sometime this year. All the other programs I
tried had some sort of limit, generally less than half an hour, after which
they'd crash or include random data in the image, or refuse to dump. I only
looked at free programs.
What do you mean by jerky? The scrolling, or the audio itself? Either way,
you'd think it would be better when it's not being streamed from the Internet.
It's also been twice compressed - once by me to get it small enough to upload,
and once by YouTube in unknown ways.
My main incentive for doing this was to make spectrograms of my recordings more
accessible to birders who don't know how to create their own. I find that if I
ask for expert advice about the id of a bird calling softly in the background
of a dawn chorus, for example, people often can't understand which bit I mean.
This way I can draw labels on the spectrogram image before I turn it into a
movie, and hopefully it'll assist them, at least with the timing of the call.
Another idea I had recently was to put movies of new recordings onto my iPad.
That would let me review them more efficiently, in bed, on the train, etc, than
just listening to audio. I wish I could make notes directly on the movie frames.
Sent from my iPad
On 13/01/2013, at 3:31 PM, "rock_scallop"
<<>> wrote:
Hi Peter,
What do you mean by "dumped spectrogram images?" What are you using to generate
the images to be dumped?
Nice sounds. I played the long one for a little while, a wee bit jerky but I
think it's acceptable for an online viewing. Would it play smoother as a
download or DVD video?
John Hartog
rockscallop.org<http://rockscallop.org>
--- In
<naturerecordists%40yahoogroups.com>,
"Marc Myers" wrote:
>
> There are shortcomings to Acousmographe but I've used it for some time. My
> original solution was to convert the Flash movie to another format with SWF &
> FLV toolkit. Lately I've been using Premiere CS5, I import the FLV file, then
> add the original audio. Then output to whatever file format I wish. The
> advantage of Acousmographe is one can annotate.
|