Running Time:

70 min

Release Date:

August 2006

Recording Location:

Track 1: near Bundaberg, central Qld
Track 10: Big Desert, Western Victoria
Track 11: Southwestern Northern Territory
Track 16: Mootwingee National Park, outback NSW
Others as per tracks

Australia - Natural Soundscapes from an Ancient Land

Australia is a land of unique, wild landscapes - and equally remarkable natural soundscapes.

Let this album take you on a sonic journey around Australia, to a diversity of environments, each with their characteristic birds and animals.

From the Daintree rainforests to the arid Outback, from The Blue Mountains to the Kimberley, from temperate woodlands to the great Karri and Jarrah forests of the south west - this album presents a symphony of natural sounds unique to Australia.

Sarah comments:

"At around 4 minutes or so, each track on this album will take you to a very different part of Australia. The scene changes from one track to the next are quite distinctive, so this album is a good one to listen to attentively, as there is much diversity to enjoy. The audio sample presents some idea of this. It really is a sonic journey."

Audio sample of this album

about our audio samples

Alternate audio link

	Welcome to the Australian Bush
1.	Dawn birdsong with Kookaburras	4.34
	The East Coast
2.	The Blue Mountains (waterfall with Eastern Spinebill, Superb Lyrebird, Yellow-faced Honeyeaters & Grey Fantails)	4.23
3.	The Scenic Rim: NE NSW & SE Qld sub-tropical rainforests (with Rufous Fantails, Paradise Riflebird, Golden Whistlers and Eastern Whipbirds)	4.08
4.	Fraser Island (White-cheeked Honeyeaters calling at dawn among the dunes)	3.33
	Tropical Queensland: World Heritage Rainforests
5.	Daintree Rainforest (night rainfall on Licuala Palms with Ornate Nursery Frogs)	3.34
6.	Atherton Tableland (highland birdsong featuring Catbird, Pied Monarch, Brown Cuckoo-doves and Large-billed Scrubwrens)	4.45
	Across the Top End
7.	Gulf Country (mangrove forest at night with White-lipped Tree Frogs)	3.54
8.	Kakadu Billabong (wetland birdsong including Darters, Green Pygmy Geese, Whistling Kite & Bar-shouldered Doves)	4.07
9.	The Kimberleys (featuring Yellow Oriole, Grey-crowned Babblers, Grey Butcherbirds and Varied Lorikeets)	4.52
	The Outback
10.	Mallee Country (Gilbert's Whistler, Mulga Parrots, plus White-eared and Brown-headed Honeyeaters)	3.21
11.	Mulga Woodlands (featuring Rufous and Brown Songbirds, with Variegated Wren, Chiming Wedgebills and Crested Bellbirds)	5.04
	Temperate Forests of the South-east
12.	Healesville (forest rainfall, with White-browed Scrubwren, Whipbird & Treecreepers)	4.28
13.	The Grampians (featuring Rufous Whistler, Superb Wren, Yellow Robin, Weebills and Gang-gang Cockatoos)	6.17
	The West
14.	Albany Coast (Rufous Scrubbird and Western Whipbird calling from coastal heaths)	3.56
15.	Karri and Jarrah Forests (Grey Thrush, Western Spinebills & White-tailed Black Cockatoos)	4.41
	Echoes Across an Ancient Land
16.	The Southern Deserts (dawn chorus of Spiney-cheeked Honeyeaters)	4.52

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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/)

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Australia - Natural Soundscapes from an Ancient Land

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