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

Chapter 2: Signal AcquisitionRecording to diskDestination fileRecording timeMaking arecordingto diskIf you click on the Record to disk checkbox, a standard file dialog appears,asking for the name and location of a file to be created for the sound you willrecord. When recording to disk, the only file format available is AIFF. Afteryou specify the file, the name and location of the file are displayed in thedialog.After you select Record to disk and specify the name of the file to be saved,you can specify the Recording Time at the bottom of the dialog. You canrecord a file of any length, limited only by the space available on your disk;however, large files may be too large to open, or too large to allow you tomake a spectrogram with the amount of RAM that your system has. You mayhave to experiment to determine the length of the largest file that you can use.Click on the Record button to start recording. The Time bar near the bottom ofthe dialog box fills from left to right to indicate the proportion of the specifiedmaximum time that has been filled. Recording stops automatically when thespecified recording length is reached.While sound is being recorded to disk, the Record button is replaced by aPause button. When recording is paused, you can Resume recording, orClose the file (which saves the sound recorded to it). You cannot Play soundrecorded to disk from within the Signal Acquisition dialog.Clicking the Done button at any time while recording to disk saves and closesthe file, and closes the Signal Acquisition dialog. Clicking the Cancel buttonbefore a file has been closed deletes the file from the disk and closes the SignalAcquisition dialog.Once a signal has been recorded to disk, you can open it from Canary’s Filemenu or by double-clicking on the file’s icon in the Finder.Signals recorded to disk are not assigned any calibration information whenthey are saved. The first time such a file is opened in Canary, it is assigned thedefault calibration that is in effect when the file is opened.Saving preferencesClicking the Save button immediately saves the settings for Device, SampleRate, Sample Size, Input Speed, Automatic Gain, Continuous Recording, Gain,and Recording Time in the current preferences file. Preferences are discussedin more detail in Chapter 8.42 Canary 1.2 User’s Manual