Does anyone know how to (or if it’s possible) to put just the sounds from the Michale Morcombe guide onto an older Ipod without a touch screen?
Aidan Sudbury ===============================
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Don’t these devices let you type in the name of the track? On my Blackberry, if I want to hear, say, Scarlet Robin, I just type “sca” and it shows me all the species with a word in their name that starts with “sca”. There are just four of these, so I pick it from the list.
For finding individual tracks, I have no need for playlists.
Peter Shute
Hi Roger,
did look at that, but at least as my Ipod is set up playlists bring up a list of all tracks on that playlist in artist order, but if I touch “More” and then select Genres and then bird calls I get an alphabetical list of Artists (which are my locality and other categories). When I click on Local (one of my categories) I get a list of Albums for that area (my family groups), clicking on that gives me a list of calls in order of track number. It is fairly easy to label tracks with Genre, just select them all and right click in Windows Explorer. I don’t use Itunes for that as I have only ever been able to edit individual tracks there. In Explorer I have all my tracks sorted into folders as it easier to keep track of songs in each category , so I have a local folder with sub folders for each of the family groups. Then I can select all the songs in each family group and assign genre, artist and album to them all at once.
The other advatage of genres is that the index it brings up has A-Z down the right hand side and you can touch there to take you that letter in the list, so touching “L” takes you Local. I think this only comes up if the list is long enough. It does require you to have multiple copies of a single track if the bird occurs in more than one area, but seems a small price to pay for ready access.
Chris
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I use playlists to group calls I might hear at a location I intend visiting. But I do that with mp3s from the BOCA CDs, and hadn’t comptemplated extracting them from the app. The ability to do that would be a nice feature to add to the app, and might help reduce the temptation to extract them.
The BOCA calls have the disadvantage that they aren’t broken up into call types like in the Morcombe app. When’s the app for those coming?
Peter Shute
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Chris, I also have an iPod touch. Have you thought of using Playlists as a further way of categorising/sorting the calls? Cheers. Roger.
Russell,
thanks for that, I had not read the T&Cs closely (or indeed at all). Another good reason to look into getting an Ipod Touch. The process I outlined below only works if you can ID each and every file correctly and for 700 odd species of bird plus some have 2-3 calls , you could be looking at a solid week’s work to get it to a state you could use, my time to do that easily covers the cost of a Touch. There are plenty of second hand Ipods on Ebay, as a marker for price the apple store is still selling 4th Gen Ipod touch 16GB models for $219. The 5th Gen models are $320 plus. As an added bonus finding things on the touch is much easier than scrolling around the tiny screen of a nano or Ipod classic. Plus you have access to a bunch of other useful bird apps, like the shorebird ID guide, the Nature Society of Singapore has a free birds of Singapore app, the Birds of tropical Australia app (free) and there are apps for overseas destinations as well. I have these and quite a few other apps and 2.3GB of music using a total of 5.2 GB on my touch. If you do get a touch, get a case for it, the screen will break if it is dropped and the cases do a good job preventing that
For reference you need to do what I outlined below to install calls you purchase on CDs onto an Ipod, It does help a lot to find your call relatively quickly.
regards,
Chris Ross
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Hi all
I think I need to remind people that the terms and conditions of use of the Morecombe app clearly state that it is unlawful to extract files or data from the app or to copy part of it to another device.
I know many if us sometimes blur the lines by making backup copies of CDs to use in the car so the bought ones don’t perish – but in the case of the Morecombe app there really isn’t any grey area. It’s not legal to format shift / extract / copy to another device outside what you are allowed to do via the Android / App Store.
Id be reluctant to give instructions on how to breach copyright, especially on a public forum. Can i ask that contributors are careful not to do this, please?
Personally, I can’t wait to get the Pizzey app on my phone so I can compare the two guides (and use them).
Russell Woodford Birding-Aus Founder
Sent from my iPhone
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I have to agree it is not an easy task to transfer unlabelled files to an Ipod. They won’t sort by folder as you might expect, it is organised By Artist/Album/track name. You can also label tracks with a genre.
This can be edited in Windows Explorer by right clicking the track (or a group of tracks you have selected) and select details. There you can edit all the fields I mentioned. I use the following organisation:
Genre: Bird Calls ( you can select a Genre in the Ipod menus so only calls come up, no songs if you have any) Artist: Locality (local area, Kimberely, Cape York etc so you have less calls to work through. Album: Family (e.g Fairy wrens, Flycatchers, thornbills etc.)
If you don’t do this or a similar scheme that will work for you they will appear in a random jumble on the ipod and you’ll have to do a*_lot_* of scrolling.
I’ve done this with a lot of call CDs I’ve purchased. It is very time consuming. I think the idea of buying a generation old used Ipod touch is a good one, the app has all the navigation to find your call built in.
Hope that is helpful,
regards,
Chris Ross ===============================
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Any idea of the price?
There’s an interesting option called “habitat sounds” that I’d like to know more about too.
Peter Shute
Sent from my iPad
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Wow, it looks fantastic! Looking forward to all of the details on pricing for the various platforms.
Thanks very much for the links. ===============================
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David To your last point. “Speaking of apps,did I see a mention or rumor of a forthcoming Pizzey app?”. Check this out.
http://www.gibbonmm.com.au/
It looks pretty swish and by all accounts will be out shortly.
Cheers Chris Gregory
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On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 10:20 AM, Aidan Sudbury wrote: Does anyone know how to (or if it’s possible) to put just the sounds from the Michael Morcombe guide onto an older Ipod without a touch screen?
I’ve been meaning to reply to this question for some time and only now getting around to it. As you’ve already learned, there are ways of extracting raw resources from iOS apps. For what it’s worth, it might be worth considering a couple of other ideas:
* Download and organize free sounds from any of the various on-line recording databases. Granted, these sounds may not be as well-recorded or as reliably identified.
* Write to David Stewart, the original recordist for the Morcombe sounds, and see if he’s willing to create a sounds-lone product that includes MP3 files with appropriate labels.
http://www.naturesound.com.au/
(Given that there, as far as I know, only a couple of people in the country making commercial-quality recordings, it’s worth supporting them.)
* Buy a used iPod Touch! A 3rd generation model won’t run the latest version of iOS, but who cares? It will run the app fine…it’s what I keep in my pocket.
For what it’s worth, sounds alone are a lot harder to work with than apps for most purposes. I once bought some CDs of sounds for another country and imported them into iTunes and put them onto the iPod. Not terribly helpful. The labels were right so that you could find and sort things in various ways but, honestly, it wasn’t that great. About the only situation where I find a raw set of labeled sounds preferable to an app is if I’m trying to learn sounds by playing them in a random order and trying to identify (cough-cough – could be called “guess” in my case) what bird they are.
Speaking of apps, did I see a mention or rumor of a forthcoming Pizzey app? ===============================
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Just looking at my copy on my iPod.
‘no part of this multimedia product may be copied or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means’
also
‘the product … will not be installed or used on multiple devices’
and
‘you agree … that you will not disassemble, reverse engineer, decompile’
So, clearly, extracting the audio files is a breach of the license agreement.
Cheers Steve
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I wonder if the app is licensed only to an Android device – in which case transferring part to another device would seem very dubious?
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Thanks for providing some technical assistance, Ian. I should add a comment, though, that anyone considering doing this might want to check whether or not it is legal to copy the MP3 files between devices. It’s not format shifting, because the files stay as MP3s. If they own a digital copy of the guide then they are allowed to install the whole guide on at least two or three of their own devices (e.g. tablet, phone) but I don’t know whether or not extracting audio files breaches copyright. As administrator of this list, I highly recommend that anyone thinking about doing this checks both the copyright info of the app itself, as well as the user agreement of the Android Store (or App Store). I don’t want anyone to think that we are condoning copyright breaches on this forum!
Can I also say that I love the Morecombe App and use the calls feature all the time to identify calls I hear (I’m hopeless with calls, an embarrassing confession for a musician!)
Russell Woodford Birding-Aus Founder
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Dear All,
it’s taken me a while to reply to this having been immersed in work, but I did some hunting and found that yes, it is possible to get the mp3s from Morcombe (at least the Android version) and put them on an iPod or other mp3 player. *But* you’d need to be tech savvy and prepared to spend quite a bit of time labelling them.
The files are stored on the sdcard of my phone in a directory called eProducts/AusBirds and are all named *.edf. You need to copy these files onto your PC and upkack them to get the mp3s. This helpful site:
http://emergent.unpythonic.net/01354324334
(which is where I got all the above info) even has a small python script that will unpack the edf files into the constituent jpg and mp3 files.
However the mp3 files do not seem to have the bird names embedded which means you need to name and/or label them manually, unless you are whizz with SQL and can write a script to do it automatically.
Cheers, Ian
PS. xeno-canto is a *fantastic* resource, but under-represented in Australia.
http://www.xeno-canto.org/ is a good source of calls and has the advantage of being legal! There are a few caveats – it has quite a few different calls of some species (so it takes some effort to decide which you want), it does not have a full range of Aussie species and as far as I know it is not moderated so I guess the identity of calls is not verified – although the ones I have used have been good. It also tells you where a call has been made, which can be helpful if you are trying to track down the local subspecies
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Hi Aidan
Yes, and no. The simple answer is that you can’t – when all the bits of an app are compiled they become a single file (well, a package of files) and even if you use an unarchive utlity to open the package, things like audio files can’t be opened or played – or even seen individually. The compile process basically encrypts everything, including the developer’s code.
A longer answer:
Technically, it is possible to reverse engineer some programs, but it is generally considered illegal because you are meddling with the developer’s intellectual property. Every time you install software, and agree to conditions of use, there is likely to be a condition that you don’t reverse engineer the software. You’d need highly sophisticated tools and a high level of programming knowledge to do this, and as I mentioned already, it’s almost certainly illegal.
Other than extracting the audio files, there is a way to get the audio out of an app – and that’s to record it on another device. There is no question with this method, it IS illegal because (a) you’d be breaching copyright by making an unauthorised copy. You’d also be breaching copyright in another way – format shifting. That’s the term for copying something into a different format. When copyright owners sue for breaches – and they do – it’s seldom one simple claim because copying one item may breach a whole long list of laws.
There are a number of digital archives of birdsong online now, and many of them allow you to copy files to a portable device for personal use in the field. You’d need to check the conditions of each site, of course, but if you find a couple then that might give you a lot of the bird calls you need. You could copy them to an iPod without a touch screen and listen to the calls.
I love the Morcombe app, and I probably use the calls about 10 times as much as I use anything else on it. I’m looking forward to other field guides taking the same step. It’s also one of the apps you can use without an internet connection. Just like Pizzey’s 1980 guide opened a new era of field guides in this country, I think the Morcombe app will be remembered as the ground-breaker that started a trend to digital guides for Australia. It’s happened elsewhere so I can’t see any reason it won’t happen here. For anyone who uses a field guide, this is just about enough reason by itself to get an iphone or an android phone.
Regards
Russell Woodford Birding-Aus List Owner http://www.birding-aus.org
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