Audio Time Marker
New!
Read the time directly off your sonograms!
See link at bottom of the page!
Field recording is a demanding activity if one is working alone. Everything must take place according to an inflexible schedule. One of the tasks that I have found to be tricky is the accurate placement of voice time announcements on the data tape. So I decided to automate the job.
ATM is a program that runs on Windows95/98/NT computers that are equipped with sound boards. It provides two basic benefits:
- A large, easy to read time display, based on the time set in the computer, and
- Audio time markers, output through the sound card, at user settable intervals.
The time marker consists of six short sounds that encode the time in HHMMSS format, followed by a well defined MARK signal synchronized with the time on the PC. The program is shipped with a set of pure sine-wave tones which encode the digits 0-9, and a harmonic-rich square-wave tone for the MARK signal. In a sonogram, they look like this:
Sonogram created with Spectrogram, Version 4.1.2 (freeware),
Copyright 1994-1997 by R.S. Horne, FFT Code by Phillip VanBaren.
Send inquiries to: [email protected].This particular example shows the time mark for 14:36:00, using the sounds that come with the program. You can alter the sounds used for time marking, by creating you own set of .WAV files corresponding to the digits 0-9 and the MARK tone. The program also comes with an alternate set of digits in spoken English, but of course these cannot be read directly in a sonogram.
ATM's primary display looks like this:
with large digits that can easily be read from several feet away on the screen of a laptop.
ATM is freeware... download a copy and try it out!
New! Read the time directly off your sonograms!
Renato Romero has developed a set of sound files for use with ATM which
ACTUALLY DISPLAY THE TIME IN THE SONOGRAM!It looks like this:
Click here to download a self-extracting archive file containing the sound file set.
To install the sound file set, create an empty directory, copy the archive file into it, and run it. It will create a set of sound files that contain the digits. See the ATM online help for how to install the file set in the program.
