Running Time:

90 min

Release Date:

September 2011

Recording Location:

Mkomazi National Park, NE Tanzania, Africa
View on Google Earth

Dawn Chorus: Tanzania

Experience an extraordinary morning of birdsong from East Africa.

In the darkness before dawn, Bush Babies and an African Scops Owl call quietly, before a Morning Thrush breaks the stillness with its pure, melodious song.

Over the next hour, the birdsong builds in waves, with Bulbuls, Doves, Bru-Brus, Hornbills, Go-Away-Birds, Spurfowl, Long-crested Eagle, Francolins, Puffbacks and Orioles all joining the growing dawn chorus.

This is a vibrant recording, rich with the diversity of birdlife to be encountered in the African dry tropics.

Sarah comments:

"This album includes a bonus track, recorded in the same location the previous afternoon, capturing the late afternoon birddsong as the sun dipped below the horizon"

Andrew introduces the recording of this album:

 

Audio sample of this album

1.

Pre-dawn: African Scops Owl

15.26

2.

The First Songbird: Spotted Morning Thrush

13.18

3.

Humming: Cicadas, Ring-necked & Laughing Doves

21.34

4.

Long-crested Eagle & Black-backed Puffback

12.30

5.

African Black-headed Oriole & Yellow-necked Spurfowl

13.17

6.

White-bellied Go-away-bird

13.48

7.

(bonus track) Late Afternoon at Mkomazi

7.45

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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/)