Setting the recorder for the first time
Previous Top Next

step 1 -- set channel Identification


Note: If you are just trying the recorder, skip stage A, scroll down to B, and type a fake name in the configuration menu.

A. If you are starting an experiment, click the Animals tab and then click new (for a new animal) or change (to switch to animal you already recorded from). This will set the animal name, age, and everything else you need to specify.
graphic

Note that all the SAP2 modules can access the animal information you just inserted, so you only need to do this once  per animal.

 

B. for each channel you plan to use, click graphic and go carefully through the options:
Setting Identification & Mode: type a bird name and check "Active" as shown below.
graphic
just to make sure, set the visualization as shown below
graphic


Go to the Next Stage ->


Or, below, you can find additional information (you probably do not need to know this):

ID: this is the internal identification of the channel. Normally you will not want to change it. Again -- do not change it unless you want to save different configurations for the same channel.
Warning: Changing “ID” instead of “Name”, and then graphic will reset all channel options

Bird Name: The recommended way of setting an animal name is not via this settings but via the “Animals” tab. For now, we will set a temporary animal name just to allow testing. The name of the animal - it can be either a string or a number. No spaces are allowed. Feel free to change it whenever you want and it will have an immediate impact on the wave file names (each wave file created by the recorder starts with the bird's name).

States & Modes

Each channel can record in one of the following modes:

Active: The channel record sound when triggered by an appropriate input.  

Monitor only: The channel display the sound but does not record or triggered other channels.

Direct recording: The channel behaves like a simple tape recorder (remember those devices?): it turns on by clicking start and off by clicking stop. It records files of certain duration, e.g., a new file every minute.

Pre-Buffer: Do not worry about this for now. It set how many samples are recorded prior to triggering. Setting it to 44100 will record sound starting 1 second before triggering occurred (e.g., about 1s before the song begins).
Slave: Recording is triggered by another (master) channel. This is useful when recording combined sound and electrophysiology. Note that the sampling and accuracy quality of most sound cards is good enough for capturing single and multiunit activity. For EEG recording you must take into account that low frequencies (2Hz and lower) are not captured by most sound cards.

Note: in order to automatically save recorded data on a slave channel, you must check 'slave' in the Sound Processing Live module of this channel. Otherwise, the content of that channel will be judged separately than that of the master. For example, if the slave channel is used to capture neural data, you want those data to be coupled to the sound so that a decision to save or delete the sound (master) channel will apply to the slave channels.
  

Created using Helpmatic Pro HTML