Running Time:

75 min

Release Date:

May 2012

Recording Location:

Near the Tarangire River, central Tanzania
View on Google Earth

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An African Night

It is deep night in the East African bush. A full moon illuminates the savannah, silhouetting ancient baobab tress.

The air is filled with a rich chorus of nocturnal insects. This choir of small critters create a gentle, pulsating chorus, each insect with its own voice; chiming, ticking, zizzing, humming…

Meanwhile bats flutter overhead, sometimes coming close and audibly echo-locating. Nightjars call mysteriously on the wing, insomniac doves coo softly, and if you listen carefully, the deep rumbling vocalisations from a family of elephants grazing nearby can occasionally be heard.

This is an ambient and spacious recording, a hypnotic meditation from the African night.

Andrew comments:

"One of our colleagues said we'd love the insect choruses in Africa. He was right - they were rich and mesmerising. Some nights we'd just lie in camp and listen until we drifted off to sleep.

During our 2 months field trip we would often leave our microphones out all night. This is one of the most rich and engaging insect choirs we recorded."

Audio sample of this album

1.

An African Night

75.02

This album on our blog

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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/)