The Wave Files

The Wave Files
 
All the raw data generated by SAP2 are saved as wave files of the following file-naming format:

graphic


When multiple channels are recorded (in a master-slave mode), e.g., when recording electrophysiology data, the master channel (typically the sound) has the name annotation showed above, and the slave channels will have the same name as the master, but starts with Sn~ where n is the channel number (e.g., S3~109_39013.... is the third slave channel of this bird, in this case an electrode located in RA).

When SAP2 records & processes data from a certain animal (life recording) it identifies vocalization events (e.g., a song bout) and save it into a wave file. Over a few days of recording, the number of these files might reach tens of thousands. Files are automatically organized into daily folders. The name of each folder is the age of the bird, e.g., the file is from bird 111 when 62 days old. The age is calculated by subtracting the age of the file from the hatch date of the bird (hatching date is automatically retrieved from the Settings table ).

Having many, relatively short files could be difficult to maintain, but SAP2 provides, in addition to the folder and name annotation, an important utility called the File Table. The File table contains information about all the files recorded for a certain bird, and it can be used to query an arbitrary subset of the data - e.g., the first 100 files of the morning. This is why it is convenient to keep the SAP2 raw data in small packages.

Created using Helpmatic Pro HTML