I spent some time researching this. Stewart Healy's solution is pretty
elegant when you finally get it done but is extremely time consuming. If you
want to store the bird songs/calls on your player without the voice
introduction then you have to individually edit each track. I spent 15
minutes editing just four songs. Then you need to manually create all of the
playlists you want. If time is no object and you want 100% control over
everything then his approach might make sense.

There is an interesting little company (www.ibirdpod.com) that built some
custom software for Windows and the Mac that takes care of a lot of this for
you. Their software helps load the songs and automatically creates a bunch
of custom playlists generated from the Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs.
They offer iPod's with the software installed or separate software (birdPod
Maker) that you can use if you already have an iPod. The nice thing about
their solution is that they remove the introduction of the bird species. The
custom playlists to make it easy to find the bird you're looking for: you
can look for birds by alphabetical list, phylo order, by habitats (fields,
forests, marsh, nocturnal etc.) plus the original order that Stokes provides
on their CD's.

The birdPod Maker software for the Eastern region is available now. I
exchanged mail with the guy who is developing the software and he says that
the Western region software will be available any day now.

The downside of BirdPod is that it only works with the Stokes CD's. I have
several other discs (birds of SE Arizona, Peterson's etc.) that will not
work with their software. I can still load those CD's onto my iPod but would
have to create my own custom playlists, edit out the voice introductions
etc.

It's also a bit pricey. If you want to buy an iPod from them with the songs
pre-installed, the price ranges from about $300 (2GB iPod Nano) to about
$500 (60 GB iPod). If you already own an iPod you can buy their software for
both regions (when Western becomes available) for $118. The Stokes CD's are
extra.

I'm going to give it a try and will report back on how well it works.

Mason Flint
Snoqualmie, Washington



>From: "Hugh Jennings" <hughbirder at earthlink.net>
>Reply-To: hughbirder at earthlink.net
>To: "Tweeters E-mail" <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
>Subject: [Tweeters] iPod for Bird Recordings
>Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2005 17:25:45 -0800
>
>I heartily second Charlie's recommendation for using an iPod for bird
>songs. I used to use a mini-disc MP3 player for many years. When it started
>having problems about 6 months ago, I went to a mini iPod with 4gb memory.
>I first became aware of using the iPod when a trip leader at the ABA
>Conference in Midland, MI last May was using one. I have almost 700 songs
>on it from the Stoke's Western and Eastern Region CDs. It only uses about
>25% of the memory. It is very easy to get the songs on the iPod. The only
>time consuming part is changing all the Track 1, Track 2, etc. names to the
>bird names. I used the 4 letter band codes which is a little faster than
>typing in the whole name. I use the same Radio Shack speaker, about $10-15,
>I used with the mini-disc player.
>
>Hugh Jennings
>Bellevue, WA
>hughbirder at earthlink.net


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>Tweeters at u.washington.edu
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