Getting to a bird

Using a Dell DJ MP3 player for field playback of bird songs.

Rev A2, November, 2005

DJ Screens 1-6show the basic menus and navigation needed to access a specific species within a family.

All operations to select a bird are done with my right thumb; almost all operations are done with the scroll-select dial (SSD).

1) The main menu can be reached instantaneously no matter what state the DJ is in by pressing the home button.

2) Accessing the library menu only requires a single select, i.e. one push of the SSD (since “Music Library” is already highlighted). Accessing the family listing requires scrolling down to “Artist” then select.

3-4) Getting to a specific family requires SSD operations -- scroll to the family, select, then scroll to “View Tracks” and select to display the list of species.

5-6) Getting to a species is the same as 3-4 above. You can then play the track directly or add it to the current play list.

Note: The Find-Artist Find-Track functions can be used instead of scrolling through the displayed names. However, since the lists are relatively short, I’ve found that scrolling is much faster.

Minimizing access time

I use captial letters in the family and species name displays to improve readability. I wear glasses for reading but obviously don’t want to mess around with them in the field. The number sequence to force families to be displayed in taxonomic order also helps (assuming that you know the order!).

You’ll also note that I’ve prefixed the species names with a letter (or number if more than 26) to force species to be displayed in taxonomic order. When I first started using the player, I used only the names which automatically display alphabetically. I’m still undecided about which system is best and to date I’ve added a prefix to less than half the tracks on the player. The alphabetic system means that you can definitely find the bird reasonably quickly (unless you suddenly forget the alphabet), whereas the taxomic system may slow you down if you forget where a bird is located taxonomically in a long list of species names (such as flycatchers).

www.aztrogon.com

Page 9 of 25