Cross correlations

[tim]

I have both Canary (Mac) and Raven (Windows). I would like to use the cross correlation feature of canary. What is the best procedure for converting Raven files or .wav sound files to a Mac format that the Canary correlation analysis function will recognize? Also when with this feature be available on Raven?
Thanks,
Ed

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Hi Ed,

Canary opens AIFF files so you'll first need to convert your .wav files to .aiff. Raven can do this for you. Just open a .wav file, then choose File > Save As, then save as 16-bit AIFF. Once you copy the files over to the Mac, you have to set the file type on the files. Mac OS 9 and its programs do not key off the file name extension but rather the stored file type for the file. Even if you are using Mac OS X, Canary needs to have the file types set. Since you seem to be a Mac user, you are probably aware of how to set file types on OS 9. I will provide some links below to tools that I found for OS X. Below is some information on file types and running Canary on OS X.

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We found out that Canary is able to run on Mac OS X. Not all of the features work on OS X, but you are able to open AIFF and spectrogram files. We copied Canary 1.2.4 to a Mac G5 machine running OS X, and we were able to launch Canary after moving it to the Applications OS9 folder and classifying it as a "Classic Application."

Once we launched Canary, we tried to open AIFF files but found that Canary was unable to see them. Canary detects an AIFF file not by the file extension but by the "type" of the file. We went to the web and found a simple application that will run on OSX and will set the type of various files. The application is called FileInfo and is available for free at http://www.panix.com/~shopinm/. Here is the link from which I was able to get to FileInfo. http://kb.indiana.edu/data/aemh.html There are other applications listed there and probably other applications out there for Mac OS X that will set the Classic Mac file type as well. To use the application, just select a bunch of files and drag them onto the FileInfo icon. Set the creator and type, then click on the "Change All" button.

Once the file types are set, Canary can see the files, and you can open them. We then created a Spectrogram from Canary and used FileInfo to set the file type to CNRY and the creator to BARP. From Canary, we could then reopen the spectrogram file and perform measurements.

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Here is an application that sets file types on Mac OS 8.6 and higher, and Mac OS X 10.0 and higher. http://www.frederikseiffert.de/filetype/ I'm sure there are others as well.

For AIFF files, the file type should be set to AIFF. Once the file types are set to AIFF, Canary should be able to open the files, then you can perform cross correlations as described in the Canary manual. I think this is likely discussed in the user's manual, but I don't have a page reference. I am not familiar with all of the capabilities of Canary so I wrote to the Canary support person to ask about performing cross correlations. He said that you don't need any special preprocessing in Canary once you have the AIFF files open.

We will be making Canary free in the near future and will discontinue support at the end of the year. We will also be putting the Canary manual on the web as a PDF in the near future. We set up an online user forum at http://canary.RavenSoundSoftware.com/ where we hope users will go to share problems and solutions with each other.

As for correlation support in Raven, this will likely show up in Raven 1.3 or 1.4 as part of a free upgrade, but probably not in 2005.

Tim Krein
Raven Team