Q: Why doesn't the Old Bird software support Macs?

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A: All Old Bird's avian flight call detection software was developed in 1998 using MatLab (and it's Simulink & Real Time Workshop toolboxes). We had committed our limited development resources to using MatLab, but this was around a low point for Apple's commercial success and MatLab's developer, MathWorks, had stopped supporting the Mac OS. Since then MathWorks began supporting the Mac OS again and we looked into getting a MatLab Mac license and porting the old PC MatLab code to Mac. But the cost of the license, including key toolboxes) had risen to over $50k. As a nonprofit, we tried to negociate with MathWorks for a discount, especially since we had contributed code to MathWorks, but MathWorks treats nonprofits no differently than for-profit corps.

We have the MatLab 4.3 PC code for the avian flight call detection software and will gladly make it available to anyone who might be interested in porting it to the Mac version (or other OS versions) of MatLab. You will need MatLab's Simulink and Real-time Workshop toolboxes.

Since we only had PC detectors, the Old Bird flight call sorting tool GlassOFire (1999) was only designed for PCs. We have begun updated GlassOFire but no release date is currently in sight.

FYI, the commercially available Cornell software called Raven (~$500) works on both platforms and as of 2008 has acoustic detectors that can be manually set for any frequency range.