G’day all
A new version of this great app for iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad with 938 North American (inc Hawaii) species is on sale for a couple of weeks.
Says half price but there are conflicting prices on the iTunes store at the moment. Either one is a bargain.
I’m just a happy user – no commercial interest.
Cheers Steve ===============================
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I downloaded the lite version for a look at the spectrograms, and I think they’re useful, but are limited by poor presentation. It’s exciting that they’re included, but they need work. I hope our local apps, Morcombe/Stewart and the forthcoming Pizzey and Knight/? include these sooner rather than later.
They seem to have applied some kind of noise suppression or compression to the recordings before generating the spectrograms, which results in areas of complete black between notes. But the background “noise” is present during the notes, so you get these confusing vertical blue bars, which should be ignored. You need to concentrate on the green bits only.
I’m thinking they’ve quantised the values into just high, medium and low (green, blue, black), rather than display a continuous range. This makes the loudest bits stand out, but hides the softer detail. I think it would have been better to just use a full greyscale.
Every track’s spectrogram fills the width of the screen, so the time scales aren’t consistent, and there are no times shown, just four pointless, identically placed tick marks on the time axis.
The frequency scale seems to be identical for each call, which allows comparison, but hides the detail of the lower pitched calls. There are no frequency labels, it just says “kHz”. They could have made them much taller – they’re so squashed that they lose a lot of detail. I think this alone would make a huge difference to their usefulness.
I find a well presented spectrogram to be invaluable for understanding a call well. These are better than nothing, but could be much better.
I wasn’t able to find a way to start and stop the tracks playing, so I had to resort to turning the volume right down while I looked at several spectrograms. They just start playing as soon as you go into that section, whether you want it or not.
The spectrogram settings are just three quality/speed settings. These don’t seem to affect the speed of spectrogram calculation on my recent iPad model, but might on an older one. They make the spectrograms look different, but I’m not sure what they do. If they affect speed of calculation they might control FFT window size or overlap.
It’s interesting that they’ve included these controls. It means that the spectrograms are generated at the time of playing. This means that they could potentially give you control of more parameters like the quantisation and scales. I would have thought they would have carefully generated them themselves and stored them as images. I suspect someone has decided at a late stage to include spectrograms, and has just set it up to auto generate them all with the same parameters. If you could control more parameters, and could save them for each track, this would be a great leap forward in the presentation of bird recordings in apps, in my opinion.
There’s a good tutorial on reading spectrograms at http://earbirding.com/blog/specs. The Canyon Wren spectrograms at http://earbirding.com/blog/specs/pitch-and-inflection can be compared to those in the lite version of the app to get an idea of how much more useful they are when done well.
Peter Shute
Sent from my iPad
iBird, by the way, also includes spectrograms for the bird calls. I’ll admit I haven’t read up on how to make use of these, but they sure look great. As I understand it, there’s a technique for using to better memorize and recall bird calls. Even without knowing what exactly they’re all about, they’re interesting and you can easily “see” the call. Many of the on-line recording libraries seem to be heading in the direction of including such graphs with recordings. ===============================
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David, A contrary view. I was in Washington last year with the iBird app on my iPhone. All the birders I met wrote it off! Apparently ‘the’ app for North America is Sibley. I subsequently downloaded the free lite version and I can understand why. Regards Alastair
Great news. It’s a fantastic app for anyone with an interest in the birds of the region. As far as birding apps go, it’s best in class. (Even better than their “HD” version which suffers from a bizarre and cumbersome interface.) Well worth it for the sounds, photos and well-organized text and maps.
Likewise. ===============================
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iPhone. All the birders I met subsequently downloaded the free lite
Which one is best? Yes 😉 It’s a bit like “what’s the best field guide for Australia”. (Pizzey, of course!) Fair disclosure: I’ve only tried iBird in the field so far but will try out Sibley and iBird side by side later in the year.
On paper, I’d say that Sibley is the finest field guide on the planet. (I know a lot of people say that about the Collins Bird’s of Europe, but I can’t see it.) Before Sibley, birders in the US all carried the National Geographic guide, which is also quite good and more compact. It would also be pretty normal to find American birders with a small box of books in their car focused on specific families like shorebirds or raptors.
For the apps, Sibley has great plates, lots of illustrations of intermediate plumages and flight patterns – all excellent. It’s also got first-rate+ sound recordings – better than iBird, when I’ve compared. (Not that I thought there was anything wrong with iBird’s recordings.) iBird, by the way, also includes spectrograms for the bird calls. I’ll admit I haven’t read up on how to make use of these, but they sure look great. As I understand it, there’s a technique for using to better memorize and recall bird calls. Even without knowing what exactly they’re all about, they’re interesting and you can easily “see” the call. Many of the on-line recording libraries seem to be heading in the direction of including such graphs with recordings.
With all of of Sibley’s obvious good points acknowledged, I still find iBird the better *app*. Sibley (like Morcombe here – the UI is the same) is a paper field guide that’s been turned into an app with the (enormous) benefit of integrated sound recordings. The iBird app (and the upcoming Pizzey here, for what I can see) takes advantage of the platform and integrates photographs, sounds, plates, text and live Web views onto various resources. I don’t care about that last part, but the photographs are a huge, huge help. For birds that are subtly different, it’s great to have photos and plates.
With the iBird 6.1 release from this week, the plates look like they’ve had their quality and resolution bumped up as well.
If possible, I’d get both guides for a trip to North America – ideally for a screen that’s large enough. If someone can’t afford these two apps….perhaps a trip to North America is already out of reach. Although to be fair, loading another app will make the iWhatever just that much heavier in your pocket….;-) ===============================
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Great news. It’s a fantastic app for anyone with an interest in the birds of the region. As far as birding apps go, it’s best in class. (Even better than their “HD” version which suffers from a bizarre and cumbersome interface.) Well worth it for the sounds, photos and well-organized text and maps.
Likewise. ===============================
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