Selecting Audio Samples

You can select a portion of audio samples in the time and frequency dimensions by using the mouse pointer in either the waveform or spectrogram plots. First, move the mouse to the corner of a rectangle you wish to select. The status bar at the bottom of the Song Scope window will display the precise position of the cursor. Next, press and hold the left mouse button and move the mouse to the opposite corner. The status bar will display the precise range currently selected. When the mouse button is released, the selection will be made as shown by a solid box in both the waveform and spectrogram plots. This selection remains in effect until a new selection is made. Note that a double-click of the left mouse button will clear the selection.

Selections made in the waveform plot will select all displayed frequencies in the spectrogram plot (bounded by the frequency range specified in the spectrogram controls. Selections made in the spectrogram plot will select only those specified frequencies.

After a selection is made, you can right click (MacOS users can control-click instead) inside the selection to display a pop-up menu with the following options:

Play Selection: Listen to the selected time and frequency portion of the audio recording through the computer's sound hardware. Note that you can also simply press the space bar to play the current selection.
Focus Beam: This option is only available when working with multi-channel audio recordings. Automatically enables multi-channel mixing and adjusts per-channel delay controls to "focus" the microphone array using beam forming.
Adjust Levels: Automatically adjust the brightness and contrast display controls such that the strongest frequency component in the selection is shown with the "brightest" color and the weakest frequency component in the selection is shown with the "darkest" color.
Zoom To Fit: Automatically adjust the horizontal (time axis) zoom such that the selection completely fills the waveform and/or spectrogram plots.
Annotate...: Pops up a dialog window so that you can annotate the selection.
Annotate as class:subclass:id: Annotate the selection repeating the most recent annotation with the class, subclass and id indicated.
Save as...: Save the selected audio portion as a .wav file.

An alternative method for selecting vocalizations is to use the Logarithmic Scale with Signal Detection mode of the Waveform Plot. In this mode, you can simply right click on a detected vocalization. The vocalization will be automatically selected and the above pop-up menu will appear.

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