Gene & other interested parties;
I've spent a lot of time recently converting bird songs in various
file formats to Mp3, and can help you out. There's a great piece of shareware
available online called "Audacity", which is a really simple program for editing
digital sound files (a web search will lead you to it). After downloading
Audacity, you will find you will need to download another file called
"Lame_enc.dll", also free on the web, which basically is an engine used by Audacity to
convert sound files to Mp3. In Audacity, you then can trim any sound file and
save it as an Mp3 (really easy), which also allows you to cut out the human
voice announcing the species, handy if you plan to use the recordings for
playback, or for testing oneself. I collect bird vocalizations using a camcorder,
use my video software to save the song as a WAV file, and then Audacity to
covert to Mp3 for my IPod! If you would like more details or additional
assistance, feel free to contact me, and I will tell you more off the listserve.
As for cassettes, I suggest buying a CD burner for your stereo- it's
cheaper and easier than any device/program that converts analog sound to
digital. Or use my silly shortcut and point the microphone of a camera or from the
computer at your speakers as you playback, proceed as detailed above. There
is more than one way to skin a technological cat!
Good luck,
Ken Allaire
New York, NY
kallaire at cs.com
www.kenallaire.com