Batsound under WINE on Ubuntu 13.04

Well Ubuntu 13.04 'Raring Ringtail' is here, and it makes for an easy upgrade, even on a dual boot Windows 7 machine, my only gripe being that it overwrote my Windows 7 bootloader with Grub-2, the Ubuntu boot loader. Not a problem unless you decide to remove Linux in which case you won't be able to easily boot into Windows. Batsound still works well under WINE but I still haven't sorted out the graphics export problem. The dialogue appears but the resulting image files are corrupted. Not a huge problem since Ubuntu has such a versatile set of screen grabbing and editing tools. I tried out crossover which is a commercial version of WINE to install Batsound.  Again, this worked fine, and now in the export graphics image dialogue box the option to export to .jpg appears but the files are still empty or corrupted. As far as I can tell, all other functions like audio capture and playback work just fine under Ubuntu.

Still plugging away at Batsound on Linux

Not much closer to a solution for the saving of sonogram images from Batsound under Linux. It seems that WINE only has limited support fir JPEG, but then .png files would arguably be better for export anyway, preserving the crisp edges of text labels. It does look like there may be a way of configuring Widows drives under WINE, so that files would not have to be in the Linux partition. That's part of the fun of Linux, problem solving....

Batsound under Linux

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.

Just for fun, I uploaded a few videos of some work I did at Manchster University where we put dead bats into a micro CAT scanner. Taking the 4000 or so x-ray images of the bat as it rotated in the chamber I stitched them together into a film. I hasten to add that the bats had all died from natural causes and had been in my freezer for years. In the first one, of a Daubenton's bat, you can see nice details of the skull, teeth, Cochlea and shoulder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxIdHgAy-Yc&feature=g-crec-u

The second is of a long eared bat, you can see the ears as light shadows. Again, nice detail in the cochlea.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEiUoa6pERw&feature=g-crec-u

Whiskered bats

Still processing the photos from the Top Hill Low batbox check. We found a couple of whiskered bats, which were a challenge to photograph as they are notoriously wiggly and vicious, but I did get some pictures of the tragus and 'gentleman's part' which are identification features.

And those of a more delicate constitution, look away now...

Film Photography

Nice article on film photography and the Lomo cameras on the BBC website today. I know a lot of photographers who still prefer to use film when they can, it's a totally different process and feel to digital photography. They both have their place in my opinion.

Bats and Biomimetics on television

Tonight on BBC1 at 9pm, I'll be on television with Richard Hammond as part of his 'Miracles of Nature' series looking at Biomimetics, how nature and evolution have inspired engineers. This was filmed in some caves in Bristol where we looked at how echolocating Egyptian fruit-bats can avoid obstacles and how this has inspired technology to help the blind. The work on these bat's echolocation call structures, and the technology we developed to record echolocation went into the 'ultracane' which is a guideance device for the visually impaired. There is some fantastic footage in high-speed infra-red of the bats obviously detecting the wires and pulling in their wings at the last moment. There is also some amazing footage of a blind mountain cyclist using the ultracane technology to steer himself down a forest track.

The footage we shot of the bats actually took about two days, not including the extra two days it took Hannah Sneyd, the researcher for the programme, to bat-proof the caves which are old sandstone mines for the Bristol glass industry and which run under Britstol docks.

We actually filmed two alternative versions, one with Richard Hammond for the BBC and a version without Richard for German TV and the international satellite market. This latter version features some amazing footage using an 'acoustic camera' that superimposes the location of a sound onto a video feed.