Hello. I am looking for any versions of Audacity tweaked for the recording of the human heart. I was told there was a Thinklabs version, is that correct? We don’t have the Thinklabs digital stethoscope, but do have USB and analog mics to record with. We of course can and are using regular Audacity now, but is there a version or plug-ins geared towards heartbeats? I saw something on sourceforge that looked malicious, and hunted around here for awhile. I did find an old locked topic containing-
"One of the developers made a custom “Audacity_Voice” for a closed source audio application some years ago (Audacity launched from that app): http://www.audiotouch.com.au/ .
He also did a custom Audacity for a commercial digital stethoscope."
So if you’ve been reading the mail, you know that we give the same response to you as to the people trying to record bats conversing. Audacity is perfectly happy managing both if you can get the sound into the computer. Typical microphones won’t go either up or down that far in frequency.
Everybody starts out life with a death grip on their wallet and good quality, wide band microphones are expensive. In your case you have the additional problem that many USB interfaces have trash, sometimes a lot of trash in the lower pitch tones. Why filter it out? Nobody can hear it and filtering cost money. One of the first steps in AudioBook processing is get rid of heartbeat, earthquake and thunder tones.
So maybe there’s a reason nothing popped out at you in a search.
I don’t think you need a special version unless it’s simplified or has some default presets optimized for this application. Your audio recording software simply has to capture the digital audio stream and send it to your hard drive in the appropriate format.
If it has a USB interface, as long as the stethoscope has Windows audio drivers you should be able to use any Windows recording software. Many USB audio devices are standardized and they can use the standard Microsoft supplied drivers.
We don’t have the Thinklabs digital stethoscope, but do have USB and analog mics to record with.
Awhile back, I was thinking about modifying a stethoscope by mounting an electret mic in the tubing. I never did it, but I think it could work…
Yes there was.
The main difference between the Thinklabs version and the regular version of Audacity is that the Thinklabs version displays both the Waveform view and the Spectrogram view at the same time. You can create almost the same thing in the regular version of Audacity by duplicating the track (select the track and then press “Ctrl + D”), and set the duplicate to Spectrogram view (see: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/audio_track_dropdown_menu.html#spgram).
As others have said, to get a good recording of a heartbeat is less about the software and more about the hardware that you are using. If you have a suitable microphone/stethoscope for recording a heartbeat, then the regular version of Audacity will work fine.
If one of the ideas is to measure blood pressure, getting the systolic point should be relatively easy, many of those noises are within human hearing. But listening for the diastolic point where the beat fades could be entertaining.