Running Time:

65 min

Release Date:

September 2008

Recording Location:

Khao Yai National Park, Thailand

Gibbon Forest

The wild and wonderful calling of gibbons is a highlight of the Thai rainforests.

Our recording begins in the predawn, with frogs croaking from a streamside pool and the first birdsong carrying through the dense forest. Bulbuls, laughing thrushes, scimitar babblers, and the heavy wingbeats of hornbills all contribute to a tropical ambience.

Eventually a group of gibbons appear, swinging acrobatically through the treetops. The males call loudly to advertise territory, their rich, expressive voices echoing through the forest. Later we hear several individuals calling to each other alternately over great distances.

 

Audio sample of this album

1.

Predawn by a Rainforest Pool

4.10

2.

First Light in the Gibbon Forest

7.07

3.

Birdsong of the Thai Rainforest

11.21

4.

Song of the White-handed Gibbon

9.46

5.

Mid-morning Rainforest Ambience

9.15

6.

Laughing Thrushes and Shama

9.04

7.

Antiphonal Gibbon Calls

14.23

This album on our blog

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Gibbons are quite common in Thailand's tropical forests, and their haunting calls can be heard most mornings. During our recent 2 months in Thailand, we recorded them on several occasions, thei...

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I thought I was recording a tropical waterfall, but no, it was just the sweat pouring off me. We have never been so uncomfortably hot and sticky. And it was only 5.30 am. This is Khao Sok Natio...

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Upcoming field trip to Thailand & Malaysia

Over the next two months, Sarah and I shall be recording and photographing in the forests of Thailand and Malaysia. For those of you placing orders during this time, Alison will be attending to inq...

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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/)