Is there a mac solution to discover if our dog barks during the day?

February 1, 2007 5:02 PM

Help me record my dog whining during the day with a mac book pro.

So we have a gorgeous, wonderful 3 year old beagle, who apparently whines and barks during the day when we're out. One of our neighbours has mentioned that she sometimes whines when he walks past our apartment in the middle of the day.

We're trying to address this by various methods: leaving her stuffed kong toys and interesting food dispensing balls each morning, not making our leaving or return exciting events etc and we hope they're working. I'm not looking for further advice on how to deal with this at the moment.

The problem is, we don't know if what we're doing is working, because we didn't know the issue was there in the first place, if you see what I mean.

So how can we check if she is barking during the day? Is there a mac compatible programme that will allow us to record for 8 or 9 hours and play the resulting file back at a high speed, but a regular pitch?
Or maybe a programme that will only activate recording when a loud noise, like Ginger barking, is heard by the macbookpro's mike? Or perhaps a motion sensitive webcam programme?
Or are my suggestions entirely too complicated?

Help me out here guys!

posted by tonylord to computers & internet (6 answers total)

a web cam?
posted by seawallrunner at 5:13 PM on February 1, 2007

Try EvoCam.

From the latest release notes: "Added Audio Sensor feature which can perform a variety of actions when sounds are detected."
posted by Bud Dickman at 5:35 PM on February 1, 2007

You could try Audacity. I think the only limit on record time is the size of your hard drive. Since you don't need really high quality duplication of the sound, you could set the bit rate to something really low and get even more record time out of it.

Also, while I'm not positive if you can play at different speed (pretty sure you can) it is a wave form editor, so you will be able to see any loud noises as a spike in the wave and jump right to it.

Also, it's free. So that's good.
posted by quin at 5:48 PM on February 1, 2007

Second EvoCam.
posted by terrapin at 5:49 PM on February 1, 2007

Third EvoCam.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:37 PM on February 1, 2007

Thanks guys. I tried EvoCam, but couldn't figure out how to make the audio sensor work.

Audacity was just was I needed!

Tony
ps no barking so far...
posted by tonylord at 3:36 PM on February 6, 2007