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Using a Dell DJ MP3 player for field playback of bird songs. Rev A2, November, 2005
© Copyright Stuart Healy www.aztrogon.com Page 6 of 25
IMPLEMENTATION OVERVIEW
For me, as a guide, it’s imperative that I can access the song or call of a specific species as quickly as
possible before an opportunity passes by. No point in having tons of material on the MP3 player if I can’t
get to what I want quickly when the need arises.
With this in mind, I set about designing and implementing a scheme that would meet my needs. I invested
many hours over a period of two months from the time that I received the MP3 player in early March
2005 until I started using it full time in the field in May 2005.
Source material
At the start of this project I only owned the Peterson Eastern and Western Bird Song CDs. I decided that I
needed something easier to work with (i.e. one species per track) and selected the following Cornell CDs
as my master source:
Bird songs of California; Geoffrey A. Keller (3 discs)
Bird songs of the Rocky Mountain States and Provinces; Robert Righter and Geoffrey A. Keller (3 discs)
Bird songs of Southeastern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico; Geoffrey A. Keller (2 discs)
Bird songs of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and Southwestern Texas; Geoffrey A. Keller (1 disc)
A complete index of all 9 discs is available as a separate document (see appendix).
There are only a few tracks that have multiple (two) species per track. Generally speaking, I’m happy
with the overall quality of the source material for my purposes. However, there are a fair number of tracks
with problems. In some cases, not enough care has been taken in terms of eliminating background noise.
Even worse, sometimes the vocalization of another species that is supposedly “in the background” is
almost as loud as the intended species.
Organization
Musicmatch is primarily designed to manage music tracks using “tags” that allow easy organization and
selection of tracks for computer playback and transfer to a portable device. Unlike previous versions of
Musicmatch, the current version (I’m using version 10) does not support multiple libraries. This is
definitely annoying since I wanted to define three libraries.
Why three libraries? The master list of CD tracks is sacrosanct.
This is my “Raw Birds” library and does not get modified nor
copied to the MP3 player, it’s used only as a source. The edited
versions of the tracks that are converted to MP3 format belong to
my “Birds” library. I also have a “Music” library. The tracks in
the latter two libraries are copied to the DJ 30.
As it turns out, I was able to achieve the same functionality using
the “Genre” tag so it was only a little inconvenient. Thus, I was
able to create “pseudo libraries” whose contents can be selected
and manipulated independently of each other.
This partial screenshot shows how the “libraries” appear. In this
example, “Raw Birds” is expanded and sorted alphabetically.