Running Time:

71 min

Release Date:

February 2009

Recording Location:

Track 1: Kauri Creek, Atherton Tableland
Track 2: Mobo Creek Crater, Atherton Tableland, Danbulla National Park
Track 3: Lacey Creek, Mission Beach.

Tropical Queensland Rainforest

This album brings you the sounds of rainforests in tropical north Queensland. It features three tracks, each a soundscape from highland or lowland habitats in the region around Cairns.

1. Atherton Tableland Dawn - The soft piping of Grey-headed Robins and the exhilarating songs of Spangled Drongos begin a rich dawn chorus in highland rainforest. The Atherton Tableland has some of the best areas of upland rainforest, and this recording takes us into the heart of it.

2. An Afternoon Rainshower - The approaching tropical rainy season is heralded by a light rainshower. This recording was made in Mobo Crater, a extinct volcanic caldera sheltering verdant rainforest, and features a diversity of mid-afternoon birdsong.

3. The Paradise Kingfishers of Lacey Creek - Fluttering elegantly with their long tail-plumes trailing, we hear Paradise Kingfishers among the dawnsongs of a lowland rainforest. Lowland rainforest is rarer than its mountain counterpart, as much of the coastal country has been cleared, often for sugar cane farms. Lacey Creek, near Mission Beach, is not only a precious remnant, but now a stronghold for the endangered Cassowary.

Sarah Comments:

This album was originally released as 'Naturescapes 1', the first in what we conceived as a series of albums featuring acoustic scenes from diverse landscapes. However it wasn't really one of our more brilliant ideas; no one knew what a Naturescape might be, and the album has failed to 'chart', as they say.

Which is disappointing, as these soundscapes are each evocative and enjoyable. So we've retitled the album to feature the rainforests they depict.

(If you've purchased the previous version of this title, this updated version will replace the older one in your order history.)

Audio sample of this album

1.

Atherton Tableland Dawn

20.01

2.

An Afternoon Rainshower

21.00

3.

The Paradise Kingfishers of Lacey Creek

29.45

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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/)