User's Manual - Cornell Lab of Ornithology - Cornell University

Chapter 1: Getting StartedPlaying back a soundAny time that you have a signal window open, you can play the signal backby clicking on the playback button. Try this now—you should hear the song ofa western meadowlark from your Mac’s speaker. As the sound is played back,a vertical cursor moves across the waveform in synchrony with the playback.You can adjust the playback volume using the Volume slider control on thecommand panel (use the mouse to drag the slider from one position toanother). You can also slow down or speed up the playback using the Ratecontrol, which has twenty positions ranging from 1/10 normal speed up to thefastest rate that your Macintosh can play. 1 The actual playback rates dependon the sampling rate with which a signal was digitized.The currently selected playback rate is shown in the display next to the slider.You can also set a playback rate by double-clicking on the rate display andtyping any decimal number followed by the return or enter key. You can resetthe rate to 1.0 by holding the option key while clicking on the rate slider. Tryplaying the sound back at different speeds.1 As of June 1995, the fastest sample rate at which any Mac can play back sounds is 64kHz.Canary 1.2 User’s Manual 11