Running Time:

76 min

Release Date:

November 2012

Recording Location:

Estonia
(1. Pähklisaare, 2. Taheva, 3. Selja, 4. Palupõhja & 5. Siiksaare, Saaremaa.)

If you like this album,
we also recommend:

Five Natural Pieces

by Veljo Runnel

This album is a meditation on time and place in nature.

These soundscapes have all been recorded in Estonia, where most of the birds are migratory - arriving from their wintering areas in April or May, and starting to leave again at end of August.

The first track puts us in early spring, with just a few sounds and the moody creaking of still-bare trees. Then we move to a forest clearing, to witness the beginning of day in the company of Woodcock, Thrush Nightingale, Capercaille, and a lone Black Grouse.

The next tracks carry us firstly to a babbling brook with late afternoon birdsong, and then a riverside village where swallows socialise prior to migrating. The final piece is set in a dark August evening near coastal lagoons, with distant waterbirds and the chirping of bushcrickets - evoking the feeling of fading summer.

Andrew comments:

"The textures of the Estonian soundscape, like boreal habitats generally, are subtle and full of character. Veljo's recording captures this beautifully, particularly a sense of space in the wild landscape. This album is very soothing to listen to, and you've got to love the ravens conversing among themselves on the first track."

Veljo's website
'Estonian Nature' - an inspiring video by Veljo

Audio sample of this album

1.

Daydreaming of Ravens

18.45

2.

Waking

18.49

3.

Evening near a Brook

15.46

4.

Riverside Village

15.22

5.

Goodbye Summer

8.00

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About the audio formats

Mp3:

Mp3 is a universal audio format, playable on iPods, computers, media players and mobile phones.

Mp3 is a compressed format, allowing smaller filesizes, offering faster download times and requiring less storage space on players, but at some expense to the audio quality. Many listeners can't really hear the difference between mp3 and full CD-quality audio, and hence its convenience has lead to it becoming the default option for audio.

Our albums are generally encoded at around 256kbps (sometimes with VBR), balancing optimal audio quality without blowing out filesizes excessively. We encode using the Fraunhoffer algorithm, which preserves more detail in the human audible range than the lame encoder.

Our mp3 files are free of any DRM (digital rights management), so you can transfer them to any of your media technology. You've paid for them, they're yours for your personal use without restriction.

Mp3 files can be burned to disc, either as an mp3 disc, or an audio CD after converting them to a standard audio (.wav or .aif) format first.

FLAC:

FLAC is a high-quality audio format, allowing CD-resolution audio. It is ideal if you wish to burn your files to a CDR, or listen over a high resolution audio system. However files usually require special decoding by the user before playing or burning to disc.

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a LOSSLESS compressed audio format. This means that it preserves the full audio quality of a CD, but optimises the filesize for downloading. Typically, file sizes of around 60% are achieved without any degradation or loss of audio quality from the source files at the CD standard of 16bit/44.1kHz.

Obviously the file sizes are larger than for the mp3 version - usually around 300-400Mb for an album, compared to 100Mb for an mp3 album.

In addition, you'll need to know what to do with the files once you've downloaded them. In most cases you'll want to decode the files to wav or aiff, either to import into programs like iTunes, or burn to CDR. Some programs will play flac files natively.

There is a lot of information about flac online (eg: http://flac.sourceforge.net/)