The “Edit database” screen provides you with a visual representation of your database, and allows you to add and delete items to it, annotate items, and to create spectrographs for measuring recordings.
"Add button"
The database is displayed as a “tree” with three hierarchical levels. The “root” is the database itself. The next level corresponds to individuals. The “leaves” of the tree are the sound recordings themselves. By clicking on the database icon, you will notice that one of the buttons on the right-hand pane is labeled “Add individual”, and if you click this, you can add an individual to the database. If you click on any individual, you will notice that the same button will read “Add sound”. Clicking on this button will cause Luscinia to ask you to locate a .wav file on your computer to load into the database.
A note about sound formats and database structure in Luscinia:
Currently, Luscinia only accepts .wav files. Moreover, Luscinia relies on the sound capabilities of the java platform itself. More recent versions of java (1.5 and up) appear to work well with most sample rates and bit depths I have tested, but older versions of the JRE (1.4) may have problems with less common wav formats.
Your wav file can (theoretically) be up to 4 GB in size on a recent MySQL installation. However, I strongly recommend that you cut-up your recording, and enter individual “songs” or “calls” as sounds. There are numerous great sound editors available that will do this for you (a personal favourite is “Audacity”). In my opinion, this makes organization of sound archives more efficient, and it certainly makes analyses easier to interpret. Future versions of Luscinia may include a system in which your original recordings do not need to be tampered with in any way.
"Remove button"
Similarly to the "Add button", if an individual is selected in the left-hand pane, the Remove button will remove that individual (and all its sounds) from the database, while if a sound is selected in the left-hand pane, the Remove button will remove that sound only.
"Edit button"
If you select an individual, and click “Edit”, a new window appears containing fields for which information about that individual can be entered. These are mostly self-explanatory. The grid-type can not be changed (e.g. to Lat-Long) at the moment, I am afraid. There are online conversion calculators between grid-types available.
If you click on a sound, and click edit, however, Luscinia will create a spectrograph of that recording. You can then measure that song. This is dealt with in the next chapter on “Spectrographs”.