This is my first posting and it seemed appropriate to comment on the
problem of providing a digital version of the BOC bird calls. I agree
with Stanley Jones that the tapes are very slow and cumbersome and a
digital solution is required:
- having all the calls on your hard disk takes an enormous amount of
disk space and for most is not practical. It is also not very
portable.
- It is possible to play the calls on the Simpson & Day CD, but again
it is not portable and some species have no recorded calls. Vicki
Powys states it is not possible to use this CD on a Mac, but I use it
on my Mac G3 by running it with VirtualPC.
- CDs are useful but you need to make your own from the BOC tapes
which does take time, but has the advantage that you can produce CDs
of exactly what you want and they can be put in the same order as
Christidis & Boles and most field guides. David Stewart has produced
some excellent CDs, but there are many species not included in his
series.
- A disadvantage of CDs is that they can only store 99 tracks even
though with short duration bird calls there is "room" for more
species. So I agree with Vicki Powys that BOC should be rapidly
producing CDs of the recordings, but owing to the 99 track limitation
there will need to be a lot of CDs which are expensive and bulky.
- Consequently I think the answer is MiniDisc (MD) as they can record
in mono and store up to 254 tracks. I own and have digitised (with
my Mac G3 and Toast) all the BOC tapes onto CDs and put all the bird
calls I want on three minidiscs. The first MD has 192 species, the
second MD 136 species and the third 160 species - a total of 488
species on three disks that take barely as much space as a single
cassette tape. My Sony MD player is lightweight and very compact and
I simply dial up the species I want to listen to in a matter of
seconds. Most MD portable players cost a bit more than CD players,
but they are smaller and have better battery life. Like CD players MD
players can endlessly replay a track or play tracks in random order
if you want to test yourself (I have deleted the commentary). I would
suggest that BOC considers releasing MD versions of their tapes in
addition to the CDs as I am sure many would be converted once they
see the possibilities.
Jeremy Robertson
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
www.shc.melb.catholic.edu.au/home/birding/index.html
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