Running Time:

74 min

Release Date:

August 2008

Recording Location:

1. Grampians National Park, Victoria
2. Sundown National Park, SE Qld
3. Sunset Country, Victoria
4. Toolangi forest, Victoria
5. near Eden, SE NSW
6. Utopia Environmental Reserve, SE Qld
7. Phillip Island, Victoria

Songbird Virtuosos of Australia

This album highlights the most unique voices among Australia's songbirds, each in 10 minute feature tracks with a supporting cast of bush birdsong.

A family of Laughing Kookaburras throw back their heads, Magpies carol in the morning sunlight, and a pair of Pied Butcherbirds give a sublime performance of synchronised duetting. In cooler forests, we hear the extraordinary mimcry of the Lyrebird on its display mound, and a forest ringing with the tinkling of Bellbirds. We conclude with the acrobatic and beautiful song of the Rufous Whistler.

This album includes a bonus track in which you walk down to an ocean beach through teatree and coastal scrub, where the songs of Wattlebirds and Silvereys are heard with the approaching surf.

Andrew comments:

"Visitors from overseas and locals alike notice that Australia has some extraordinary birdsong.

"Underlying this are behaviours and vocal strategies uniquely developed in antipodean birds. For instance, colonies of Bell Miners use their voices to create a kind of sonic exclusion zone, dissuading other species from entering their patch of forest. Magpies are highly intelligent birds whose vocalisations facilitate their complex social lives. Kookaburras are co-operative breeders that chorus together as a family. Lyrebirds use mimicry as the basis for a spectacular display which shapes their entire breeding biology. And the duetting songs of Pied Butcherbirds display an aesthetic sensibility through which they bond closely as a breeding pair.

"This album features some of these standout species - each a feathered virtuoso."

Audio sample of this album

1.

Kookaburra Chorus

10.01

2.

Pied Butcherbirds Duet

9.45

3.

Magpie Morning

9.55

4.

Lyrebird - The Perfect Mimic

9.55

5.

Bellbird Forest

9.58

6.

The Rufous Whistler's Song

14.11

7.

Wattlebird Scrub (bonus track)

10.01

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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/)