(POSTED TO THE BIOACOUSTICS WEBSITE IN 1996)

Bioacousticians:

Several posts recently have asked about analyzing sounds on PCs and on Macintoshs. I cannot answer the latter question, and can only provide *one* perspective on the former.

Initial disclaimer: Although I have been in and out of the bird audio business since 1956, I have gleaned all the following using "auto-research" and thus may, unintentionally, mislead or misinform someone. To the best of my knowledge the below stuff is as clear and true as I can make it. Corrections passionately requested!

The "IBM-contemptible" PC has come a long way with Win 95, with Sound-blaster now essentially the de-facto sound card standard, (I suspect) despite Redmond’s wishing it was otherwise. Every Windows version has come with some default sound player/ editor/ etc. Years ago I bought (misguidedly) a "Windows Sound Board" - - what a disaster!

Nearly three years ago, I queried an "ALT" newsgroup on audio and kept running across references to COOL.EXE by Dave Johnston in Washington State - as shareware. I DL a copy and it not only filtered and edited WAV files, but made colored spectra and provided significant (if slow) editing in both time and frequency domains. It would handle every type of sound file I could find mentioned or discussed.

I immediately sent Dave about $40 for the full functionality and the next upgrade, and he sent me my unique password by email the day after he got my check, so there was no reinstall—it just suddenly worked completely.

He then apparently sold the business to Syntrillium Software Corp, P.O. Box 62255, Phoenix, AZ 85082-2255 ( http://www.syntrillium.com/ ) who now distributes seemingly increasingly cool versions (sorry ;-D).

The version I now use is Cool Edit Version 96 strictly for Win 95, 32 bit, I use it on a Pentium 200 MHz. with 32 Megs RAM and a 3 Gigabyte drive. It is more than 20 times faster than the previous version (used on a 486DX 66 Megahertz.) the speed-up owing, I estimate approximately to x6 to the hardware and the rest to software enhancements.

Faster at what? At creating spectra, filtering files with filters that morph between one curve and another following a third, transition curve; faster at normalizing amplitude, and copying from clipboard sounds of different sampling rate and bit patterns; faster at re-sampling a sound to raise or lower the pitch by a fixed amount; faster at resampling a sound file to speed it up or slow it down without changing the pitch at all; faster at fading in or out a file.

I have never even read about or tried about 50% of its features because I am, not "into music".

For example, loading an 8.5 Meg bird song file of an Eastern Phoebe, takes 4 seconds (22050 Hz samplingrate, Mono, 16 bit, 4.3 million samples= 3 minutes 18 seconds of sound). Creating a frame-filling color=soundlevel spectrum from this file, using a Blackman-Harris transform over 120 db range with 512 visible bands takes 3 seconds, or spreading 120 db over 1024 bands takes 6 seconds.

Filtering the same file with a three break point bass filter to remove all energy below 300 Hz, sloping up to 10% remaining at 600 Hz, then to 100% from 900 Hz up to the Nyquist frequency (11KHz) takes 53 seconds. You can create two such filters, designating one as ‘initial’ and the other as ‘final’, and click and drag a transition curve, say from initial, up to final and back again so a particular freuqency shaping is faded in then out.

Such filters, once clicked and dragged, can be named and stored for later use. For example, I have morphing filters to remove Crow and Bluejay calls from my recordings on file. I also have about twenty to remove insect choruses (usually 5-6 kHz) from my recent Belize recordings.

The usual disclaimer: I have no interest in this software and as little to do with Mircosoft as possible.

But I will say that this rig, which cost me less than $ 2800 is all I need to create and manage a library of (ultimately) well over 1000 species of bird songs. Anyone wishing samples from me for personal or scientific usage (please so state) feel free to submit a request by email, but please realize: even [22050 Hz mono 16 bit] files are 43k per second of recording time in size . . . a single Black-billed Cuckoo song could take 20 minutes to download!

Oh, and watch out! A WAV file is not a WAV file - there are seemingly dozens of standards out there, some compressed, some not.

BTW, I have had complaints that AOL’s "WAV converter" for Mac’s didn’t! but Uncle Billy’s did . . oh, well!

BTBW: Don’t settle for 8 bit PCM files for any reason! Use 16.

Regards,

Marty

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Marty Michener 42.73N, 71.53W NSS #17757 K1YLN marty@mich.mv.com MIST Software Associates, 75 Hannah Drive, Hollis, NH 03049 (603)-598-1605 (FAX 889-8388)