After someone asked me about sound analysis tools under Linux at the BCT conference in York it's been on my mind. There is the excellent Audacity, but this has limited tools of interest to the bat surveyor, good though it is. I had an old and very unresponsive laptop that was struggling with Windows XP (20 minutes to boot-up - not good), so I put Linux on it, Ubuntu 12.10. The installation was not without issue, the wireless networking especially, but once it was on I had a working, fast laptop. Now for Batsound....
I was expecting a fight, but it was actually very straightforward. First from Ubuntu software center install WINE (Wine Is Not Emulator). Then right click on the Batsound.msi file. It actually says in the WINE documentation that it will not install from an .msi, but this was fine. This will install it to a virtual C drive which is actually hosted on your Linux home partition. Enter your name, organisation and the serial number and off it goes.
Batsound then appears in your list of applications (DASH in Ubuntu), click on it and it runs! Just as fast as normal. I'll report any issues I find but at the moment the only thing I have found not working is that it won't save the workspace as an image file. Also, you can't access your normal C:\ drive for files. There must be a workaround for this somehow.
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