Two prominent birds on Pulau Ubin – calls from movie clips

During the ecology class' field trip to Pulau Ubin, we alert students to prominent and unmistakeable bird calls. Two of these are the red jungle fowl and the straw-headed bulbul. These calls were recorded as movie clips with a camera and iphone by my field trip kakis – Marcus Chua recorded the bulbul's call and Amanda Tan recorded the junglefowl's call.

I used Quick Time Player 7.6 (coughed up for a license ages ago) to export the audio track out as an AIFF file, trimmed the sound down to the relevant bits and exported it out as an AIFF file once again. I did this earlier this morning for my 10am lecture with the current batch of LSM2251 ecology students.  

This afternoon, one of my online kakis was shaking her legs at OBS and using the wireless while the office getaway drowned in the rain. So I decided to try something I had not done for a long time – mount the audio files on the wordpress blog.

I emailed the two aiff files to posterous which mounted the aiff files beautifully as has always done. However, the automatic export to wordpress failed as the latter requires mp3 files. QuickTime Player 7 does not provide mp3 export capability and while iTunes could do it, it would require me to switch my default AAC import setting to mp3 before mp3 becomes an available export option.

So I cast about for some free software and remembered All2MP3 but somehow it was unable to read the file. Then I tried NCH Software’s Switch which worked beautifully. Switch is free for non-commercial use.

Switch for converting AIFF to MP3

Subsequently I followed the instructions about embedding audio and here we are:

Straw-headed Bulbul
Two calls run continuously due to poor editing; recorded with a camera on movie mode.

Red Jungle Fowl
Two calls recorded with an iPhone

P.s. Amanda Tan, who claimed to be a stranger to all these tools figured this out earlier on her own, using her pc and Audacity. That’ll be integrated with this (after I find out a bit more) for a post on Habitatnews later.

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