Running Time:

74 min

Release Date:

December 2008

Recording Location:

Sunaberra National Park, western Orissa, India

Indian Woodland Birdsong

Deciduous woodlands are found across the Deccan plains of central India, and are home to some of India's most characteristic birdlife. This album comes from one unedited recording, with birdsong gradually develping as the sun rises.

We begin with white-browed fantails, prinias, barbets, bulbuls, orioles and other small birds together weaving a melodic chorus. Among them, the quick drumming of a tiny brown-capped pygmy woodpecker sounds like a creaking door, while alexandrine parrots, turtle doves and scimitar babblers can also be heard. Later a pair of Indian grey hornbills fly in, and a troup of langurs call nearby.

This is a magic recording from a perfect morning, presenting a symphony of India's dry-country songbirds.

Audio sample of this album

1.

In the Soft Light Before Sunrise

14.46

2.

A Symphony of Small Birdsong

15.52

3.

Turtle Doves and White-browed Fantail

16.42

4.

Brown-headed Barbets and Plum-headed Parrots

12.09

5.

Indian Grey Hornbills Fly In

15.00

This album on our blog

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"But you will not be finding any birds singing in that area sir!" The Indian National Parks officer smiled reassuringly at me from behind his desk. My heart sank. "How do y...

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Recording in India 2006, an introduction

India may seem like an unlikely destination to experience the wilds of nature. With a population of over a billion people, are there any places in the subcontinent that human presence has not over...

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About the audio formats

Mp3:

Mp3 is a universal audio format, playable on iPods, computers, media players and mobile phones.

Mp3 is a compressed format, allowing smaller filesizes, offering faster download times and requiring less storage space on players, but at some expense to the audio quality. Many listeners can't really hear the difference between mp3 and full CD-quality audio, and hence its convenience has lead to it becoming the default option for audio.

Our albums are generally encoded at around 256kbps (sometimes with VBR), balancing optimal audio quality without blowing out filesizes excessively. We encode using the Fraunhoffer algorithm, which preserves more detail in the human audible range than the lame encoder.

Our mp3 files are free of any DRM (digital rights management), so you can transfer them to any of your media technology. You've paid for them, they're yours for your personal use without restriction.

Mp3 files can be burned to disc, either as an mp3 disc, or an audio CD after converting them to a standard audio (.wav or .aif) format first.

FLAC:

FLAC is a high-quality audio format, allowing CD-resolution audio. It is ideal if you wish to burn your files to a CDR, or listen over a high resolution audio system. However files usually require special decoding by the user before playing or burning to disc.

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a LOSSLESS compressed audio format. This means that it preserves the full audio quality of a CD, but optimises the filesize for downloading. Typically, file sizes of around 60% are achieved without any degradation or loss of audio quality from the source files at the CD standard of 16bit/44.1kHz.

Obviously the file sizes are larger than for the mp3 version - usually around 300-400Mb for an album, compared to 100Mb for an mp3 album.

In addition, you'll need to know what to do with the files once you've downloaded them. In most cases you'll want to decode the files to wav or aiff, either to import into programs like iTunes, or burn to CDR. Some programs will play flac files natively.

There is a lot of information about flac online (eg: http://flac.sourceforge.net/)