Was very kindly sent the latest version of Batsound by Lars Pettersson. This is now version 4.1.4 and has a number of added useful features. The first is that you can now play back sounds at reduced speed without having to fiddle about with the time expansion factor. This used to be a real pain if you had recorded something on a D1000x at 500 kHz and then wanted to listen to it at 10x time expansion as you had to put in a time expansion factor of 500/44.1 = 11.34. The second is that you can now export graphic images in a variety of formats icluding windows metafiles, jpeg and png. This is a big improvment as the bitmap images in the previous versions were HUGE when imported into powerpoint. From my point of view, the best new feature however is that you can now more easily extract GPS information from files recorded from a D1000x or D500x with an attached GPS unit This makes import into Google Earth or GIS software a whole lot easier as you can extract all the GPS information from a whole folder into a spreadsheet. Nice

Wildlife Acoustics have launched the new SM2BAT+ ultrasonic monitor. Superficially similar to it's predecessor, this new incarnation can now natively record in zero crossing mode as well as full spectrum. This is now implemented in hardware rather than the cumbersome software conversion previously. This should improve sensitivity as there were reports of the conversion of full spectrum to zero crossing losing a lot of weaker calls. The file format is now standard .wav format rather than the in-house .wac format which took an age to convert from. It will be interesing to see if Anabat comes back with anything in return now that PDAs are getting harder to source as they're being replaced by smartphones.

Sad news to start that year that Kodak has filed for bankruptcy protection. This of course does not mean there will be no-more Kodak film, but it does obviously put the film part of its business under even more pressure. Perhaps this may do the industry some good in consolidating film production for Ilford in black and white, and Fuji in colour, but any loss of diversity in product ranges is a great shame. Personally I moved to Ilford and Fuji some years ago following the loss of the fantastic Kodachrome 25, one of the most naturalistic and finest grain films ever produced.