Running Time:

68 min

Release Date:

July 2008

Recording Location:

Blue Mountains National Park, New South Wales

The Blue Mountains

Birdsong echoes up from the depths of a deep gorge in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, Australia.

So begins our sound journey through this spectacular landscape, where precipitous cliffs, sheltered gorges and open heathy ridgetops provide habitat for a rich diversity of birdlife. Hear morning birdsong in majestic Blue Gum forests, the evocative calls of cockatoos overhead, Honeyeaters and Silveryes singing ebulently among the heathlands, and waters flowing in hidden valleys.

Discover the secrets of one of Australia's most beautiful regions.

Andrew comments:

"What I love about this recording is the sense of space I was able to capture. From the top of sheer cliffs, the far-off sound of Lyrebirds singing on the valley floor, some hundreds of meters below, was clearly audible. Meanwhile a flock of Silvereyes flitted around in front of me, so I was recording immediate and very distant sounds all at once.

"This theme recurs throughout the album - hearing near and far - giving not only some delicious acoustic effects, but a real sense of the grandeur of the landscape.

"The Blue Mountains is listed for its World Heritage values, and recently the local council announced it would investigate the integration of Earth Law and the Rights of Nature into its future operations and planning - a visionary development."

Audio sample of this album

1.

Echoes from the Deep Gorge

11.39

2.

Blue Gum Forest

9.32

3.

The Heathland Dawn

3.37

4.

Birdsong Across the Ridgetops

24.57

5.

Silveryes among the Grevillias
   (with Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos)

5.37

6.

Valley of the Waters

9.00

7.

Nightime Ambience

3.45

This album on our blog

New nature sounds album release: "The Blue Mountains"

Nature sounds recorded in the Blue Mountains National Park feature in our latest album release: "The Blue Mountains". The album is an evocative sound journey into the nature of one of Au...

Read more >

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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/)