Grant Hendrickson wrote:
>The National Audubon CD on North American Birds is excellent in most
>parts. I have been extremely disappointed in the bird songs, however.
>Many are so distorted as to be useless. I sent one back and the
>replacement is just as bad. I tried it on three different platforms;
>the problem persists. Check out the House Finch and Golden Crowned
>Sparrow for examples of this.

I just checked my copy, and the House Finch was just fine (sounded like my
feeder on a slow day). The Golden-crowned Sparrow sounded a little odd (a
bit of aliasing, maybe?), but not completely outlandish. What systems are
you using, mac or PC? The sounds are in Quicktime format, and need
Quicktime 2.0 or higher, so check if that's the version installed on the
machines you tried out. If you have a sound program that can manipulate
quicktime files, you might try that too (the house finch call is in the
file Images/Birds86/8590.mov). Also try running some quicktime movies
which include sound to see if they also have problems; if so, it's probably
not a bad cd-rom.

>Contact with Random House, the publisher, gave me a "we're sorry"
>response but nothing else.

Fairly typical of book publishers as they try to move into the electronic
age. The level of expertise on their 'help' lines is to look up product
numbers. Not that MegaSloth is any better :-)



Allyn Weaks
allyn at cornetto.chem.washington.edu aka allyn at u.washington.edu
Pacific Northwest Native Wildlife Gardening:
http://chemwww.chem.washington.edu/natives/