Ann Richardson wrote:

>While there are some positives features to this CDRom the sound is not one
>of them and I am certain my system isn't the problem. Some of the
>recordings, eg the two that were mentioned earlier( House Finch and
>Golden-crowned Sparrow) sound like poor recordings to me - badly distorted-
>caused by recording at too high a level.

I'm beginning to wonder if I accidently got an anti-lemon disk (or maybe my
ears are just bad?). My house finch seems just fine (I have real house
finches in the yard for comparison), and though my GC Sparrow has an odd
breathiness in parts, but I don't think I'd call it dreadful (though I
haven't heard the real thing, or other recordings, for comparison). The
other songs that I've sampled at random also sound ok to me, if not exactly
as if it were a live bird in the room :-). They're comparable to some
Peterson tapes (also from Cornell?) that I borrowed a while ago.

> When I first listened to some of
>the sounds I wondered how the Cornell Lab. could have used such bad
>recordings but on checking the cover I find there are no credits for sound
>at all!!

The full credits are buried in the software. Go to the Notebook section
and select References/Credits. The sounds are indeed from Cornell. Though
that doesn't necessarily mean that perfect originals weren't screwed up in
the conversion process by someone else...I don't know if Cornell supplied
the Quicktime versions.

> It is slow, especially if using the index to locate a species.
>IMHO a list in taxinomical order would have been much more useful than a
>partially alphabetical list.I must have spent 15 min. trying to find
>Sparrows because they were listed as American Sparrows.

Yes, it's a really user-patronizing interface, and doesn't allow full
searches of the database (turns out you can't even search on scientific
name!). But are the others any better? I find myself hating more and more
software these days for that sort of reason; I want as little interference
between me and _all_ of the data as possible, but that's getting
rare--publishers seem to want to protect people from doing any more than a
few set activities. If I ever manage to put a decent interface onto their
data, I wonder if it's legal for me to publish it? :-)


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/