[Tweeters] audio recording advice -- and also crossbills

[Steve Hampton]

I'm forwarding this useful discussion and links to webinars about recording
bird sounds. This is from a California listserv, which is apparently where
a lot of crossbills are this year. They are sure thin on the Olympic
Peninsula right now. Even our Type 3's may be in California.

For a free phone recording app, where you can boost the gain (increase the
record volume), I highly recommend Voice Record Pro. The icon is red and
black with an old microphone image. It was mentioned in *Birding *magazine
years ago and I've used it ever since. For post-processing, Audacity is
free and works great for me. It allows you to set the volume exactly how
eBird recommends, and clean up white noise to some extent.



---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Lance Benner <lbenner at charter.net>
Date: Wed, Feb 7, 2024 at 9:23 PM
Subject: Re: [CALBIRDS] Red Crossbill Irruption Update: Feb. 2024
To: Timothy Burr <tburr at san.rr.com>, <CALBIRDS at groups.io>, <
lacobirds at groups.com>


Hi Again Everyone,

A bit more to add to the discussion:

First, thank you to Tom, Matt, and Tim for their feedback and suggestions.

Recording bird sounds, dealing with audio equipment, audio software, and so
forth can seem pretty complicated but with some patience you can get pretty
good at the key steps pretty quickly.

I did a two-part presentation on an "Introduction to Recording Bird Sounds"
for Los Angeles Birders a while back.  Those presentations are available
online at:

https://www.labirders.org/webinars/sound_recordings_pt1.html

and

https://www.labirders.org/webinars/sound_recordings_pt2.html


Those talks might help answer some questions.  Some of the equipment I
described is no longer manufactured (the talks were in 2020), but the
techniques and reasons for recording bird sounds are definitely still
valid.

Those talks didn't say much about using audio software though, so here's
description of some things that I normally do.  This is going to get a bit
detailed.

The software I use most often is Audacity, although I also use Raven Lite
occasionally.  Both are free.  Raven Lite is easier to use but not as
capable as Audacity.  Audacity is more complicated and not as intuitive.
It doesn't look as spiffy either.  There are other free apps available but
these are the ones I've used.  There are also some really good but
expensive apps available such as Raven Pro and Adobe Audition.

Once I have a recording, I transfer the file to a laptop (typically by
connecting a USB cable from my recorder to my computer), stick the file in
a directory with other sound files from the current month and year, and
then open it up using Audacity to check it.  Audacity is free and very
capable but it can be confusing at first.  After you load a sound file (or
even a video file with sound--Audacity can handle those), you'll see a
rather cryptic default display that isn't a sonogram.  It's a plot of sound
waveform amplitudes.  To generate a sonogram, look for a small rectangle on
the left that has the name of the file.  Click on that, and then scroll
down and select "spectrogram."  That will generate the audio spectrogram,
also known as a sonogram.   Then you can see what you've got.

After listening to the file, if I decide to upload it to an eBird list,
then I usually do a couple more steps.  First, I trim stuff at the
beginning and end that I don't want, such as handling noise, or if there's
some loud sound at the end (say, an approaching car or plane).  As Matt
mentioned, the folks at eBird have some guidelines for recordings, and one
of their key recommendations is to normalize the file.  Normalizing usually
amplifies the sounds unless there were really loud sounds already on the
recording.  If that's the case, normalizing will reduce the volume
somewhat.  Again, the goal is to make the maximum volume the same across as
many audio files uploaded to eBird as possible.

Audacity has a settling for normalizing: Effect > Normalize.  First,
though, you need to select the part of the file you want.  For simplicity,
let's say it's the whole file.  Go to Select > All, which will highlight
the whole sonogram,  Then go to Effect, scroll down to Normalize, and
select "Normalize peak amplitude to" and enter "-3" in the blank box.  This
will make -3 dB the loudest sound on the file.  This is one of the eBird
recommendations.  Then go to File > Export to output a new version of the
file with your modifications.  I suggest adopting a new file name to avoid
confusion with the original.  After that, you're ready to upload it to
eBird.
It's a good idea to output the same format that you input.  So, if the
origina was a wav file, output another wav file.  wav files are
uncompressed and can be rather large.


Regarding red crossbill recordings obtained with Merlin, unless you're
really close, the sounds will often be faint and hard to hear.  Getting
closer will boost the volume substantially, but that may not be possible in
many instances, so amplifying by normalizing will be a big help.

Audacity (and Raven Lite) can also do straight amplification where you
select the amound in dB (Audacity) or the factor to multiply (Raven Lite).
  If you do that, don't amplify too much or the sound will saturate.

Presumably Raven Lite has a way to normalize too but I didn't find it when
I perused the software a short time ago.  It can certainly amplify, though.

Getting back to red crossbills, if you're interested in learning a lot more
about their flight calls, geographic distributions, biology, and
interesting questions that haven't  been answered yet, there's a talk on
this species available on the Los Angeles Birders website:

https://www.labirders.org/webinars/crossbills.html

These talks are free and available to everyone.

Hope this helps, and again, if you find red crossbills anywhere in the
world, please record them!

Regards,

Lance

Lance Benner
Community Science Chair, Los Angeles Birders
Altadena, CA






--------------------

From: "Timothy Burr" <tburr at san.rr.com>
To: <CALBIRDS at groups.io>
Sent: February 7, 2024, 5:23 PM PST
Subject: Re: [CALBIRDS] Red Crossbill Irruption Update: Feb. 2024
I would add to Matt’s final statement RE:Cornell/Macaulay Lib vs.
Xeno-canto that the EBIRD audio files are as he states (mostly unedited and
therefore of limited utility), BUT there are MANY more files archived in
the Macaulay Library that have been provided to Cornell by recordists using
professional sound equipment, are of high quality, and are therefore of
great utility.  Yes, Xeno-canto files are easily downloadable.

Tim Burr
Poway, CA

On Feb 7, 2024, at 4:02 PM, Matt Brady <podoces at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello all. Here is the eBird/Macaulay guide to editing audio recordings:
https://support.ebird.org/en/support/solutions/articles/48001064341-audio-preparation-and-upload-guidelines.
The only addition I would make to their guide is to fade in/out at the
beginning and ends of your recordings. I find that a majority of audio
uploaded to eBird/Macaulay has not been edited at all, and is therefore of
limited utility. If you want to get the most out of your recordings, please
consider following these guidelines.

Additionally, xeno-canto.org is another great resource for audio recordings
with a few advantages over Macaulay, namely audio files can easily be
downloaded and audio files tend to be edited and therefore of higher
quality.

Matt Brady

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-- 
Steve Hampton
Port Townsend, WA  (qatáy)
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