Running Time:

66 min

Release Date:

November 2015

Recording Location:

Bialowieza forest, Poland

Echoes from the Ancient Forest

by Izabela Dluzyk

In central Europe, in the borderland between Poland and Belarus where two Slavic cultures meet, there lies an ancient, primeval forest. Here for thousands of years, nature has lived by its own rules. This is the Bialowieza Forest.

Bialowieza is a last memento of truly virgin forests that used to cover European lowlands centuries ago. The mysterious ancient woodland, full of entanglements of fallen trees and whispers of the wind, brimming with birdsong in the spring and with roars of rutting red deer in the autumn, looks at us from the height of several hundred year old oaks and spruces.

Mutilated throughout the ages, stripped of plants and animals, yet against odds always throbbing with life, it has survived till the present day as a biosphere reserve. But most of all it has survived as a legacy, as a task for humanity.

Izabela Comments:

This album contains recordings made in Bialowieza in May 2015, both in the primeval forest and on meadows in the Narewka river valley. The recordings have not been processed or modified in any way. They provide a faithful picture of what nature itself intended to present.

I deeply wish them to describe, in nature's own words, the unique beauty hidden in this remarkable place, and to reveal at least a tiny bit of the mystery of the soul of the primeval forest of Bialowieza - ancient, but always young and alive.

Audio sample of this album

1.

Morning in the Primeval Forest

13.31

2.

Close Encounters

5.55

3.

By a Small Stream in the Rain

2.38

4.

Rainy Soundscape with a Robin

3.16

5.

Tale of Ancient Trees

3.29

6.

Evening Songster

4.30

7.

Morning on a Meadow in the Narewka River Valley

7.19

8.

Midday on a Meadow

2.14

9.

Concert at the Narewka River

6.37

10.

When the Wagtail Visits

4.05

11.

Evening Orchestra

6.14

12.

Nightingale's Lullaby

5.53

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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.

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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/)