Running Time:

69 min

Release Date:

March 2012

Recording Location:

Tarangire, Katavi and Ruaha National Parks, Tanzania

Safari - An African Wildlife Encounter

Come on Safari, and get close up to Africa's amazing wildlife!

Our listening safari begins in the pre-dawn with gentle birdsong including Morning-thrushes, the haunting wail of hyenas and the trumpeting of an elephant. As we journey out onto the savannah and woodlands, we hear the calls of impala and monkeys, herds of wildebeest on migration, the braying of zebras and the mighty roars of a pride of lions.

Birdsong abounds, including animated flocks of social weaver birds. At the end of a day, we are treated to a gruff cacophony from hippos wallowing in a pool, the cries of bush babies, and the low growls of a secretive leopard.

Andrew comments:

"These recordings present some of the highlights from nearly 2 months of recording in Africa. Our microphones spent many hours out in the landscape, risking their existence to capture these sounds. They survived, and we were lucky to get some very up-close and atmospheric recordings of wildlife, often of animals literally walking past the microphones!

This album is not for the faint-hearted, or those seeking a relaxing listen, but it does offer a fascinating experience of the real wild Africa."

Audio sample of this album

1.

Preparing for Safari at Dawn, with Jackal, Hyena, Elephant and Morning Birdsong

9.33

2.

Herd of Wildebeest

5.07

3.

African Woodland with Impalas Grazing

11.48

4.

Vervet Monkeys on Alert

2.27

5.

The Lion Pride

2.16

6.

Grassland with Flocks of Social Weavers

5.07

7.

The Elephant's Bathtime

5.47

8.

Zebras at the River

5.33

9.

Wildebeest Migration

5.42

10.

The Hippo Pool

8.30

11.

Nightfall, with Bush Babies, Baboons and Leopard

7.35

This album on our blog

Recording nature sounds in Africa

The African landscape is dominated by big animals; wildebeest, zebra, elephant, lions - the animals people come from all over the world to see. For me as a nature sound recordist, they posed both a...

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Track by track through the 'Safari' album

With this post I'd like to take you through our new recording 'Safari' track by track - sharing how we made the recording and give you an insight into what you're hearing. Track 1: Prepa...

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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/)