YavaScript birdsong (ambient sounds) emitter

YavaScript birdsong emitter is an advanced ambient sound emitter for your parcel. It knows five different times of day: dawn, morning, afternoon, evening and night, and will play sounds appropriate to that time of day, and at suitable intervals. These times of day are calculated using the SL sun, not the SL clock - see note at end.

The birdsong emitter comes pre-loaded with over 30 different bird sounds (as well as crickets and locusts for evening). It is ready to use; just rez it on your land. You don't need to do anything else.

The instructions below are what you will receive if you buy the product from the vendor. It comes in three versions; two different stones (textures designed by Elgyfu Wishbringer, with my sincere thanks), and an invisible prim, which you can rez anywhere on your land (just type ctrl-alt-T to see invisible things), but with a little building skills you can texture it how you want, or even take everything out of it and put it into another prim (say, a tree).

Configuring your birdsong emitter
=====================
You don't *need* to do anything; however, there are a number of configurable parameters.

Commands can be accessed through a menu, by clicking on the emitter. Or they can be typed directly into your chat line (provided you are within chat range of the emitter), by typing '/65' before the command. 65 was chosen because 6 looks like b, and 5 looks like s: 65 for BirdSong, easy to remember!

Volume
=====
From the menu, select Volume. You will get another menu, from where you can select a volume from 1 to 10. Alternatively, type (for example) '/65 volume 8'.

On/Off
=====
Click on the emitter; select Off or On as appropriate from the menu. Or type '/65 off' or '/65 on' respectively.

Menu on/off
========
If you don't want the menu to be triggered when you touch the emitter, you can switch it off - select 'Menu off' from the menu, or type '/65 menu off'.
To command the emitter then, you will have to type the commands, using '/65 <command>' (the commands are the same as you see in the menu, and you must be within chat range). You can still access the menu by typing /65 menu. You can turn the menu back on by typing /65 menu on.

Reset
====
Click on the emitter, and select Reset from the menu. Or type '/65 reset'.

Configuration notecard (advanced users)
=========================
You can configure the average interval between sounds for different times of day, at what point the dawn and evening periods start and end, and the channel that the script listens on using the Configure notecard, which you can find in the Contents of the birdsong emitter. The notecard contains instructions on what to do (it's very easy). You must do a reset for any changes to have effect.

Adding sounds/deleting sounds
====================
You may add your own sounds, or delete sounds, as you wish. You will see the naming format of pre-loaded sounds; follow that for your sounds:

Sounds begin with one or more capital letters, D, M, A, E or N (for Dawn, Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night). This is followed by an underscore (_), and then the name of the file.

For example, say you have a sound file called TawnyOwl, and you wish to include it, to play at nighttime, simply drag it into the Contents tab of the emitter, and change its name to N_TawnyOwl.
If you have a sound file called Robin, which you want to play ad dawn, morning and afternoon, drag it into the Contents tab of the emitter, and change its name to DMA_Robin.

You do not need to reset the script; however, if you add (say) a nighttime sound, and it is already nighttime, it will not see that sound until the following nighttime if you don't reset it.

Playing a sound at the start of a period
========================
Say, for example, you want a cockrel to crow at dawn, but only once. Copy the sound of a cockrel crow into the Contents tab, and call it D-init (note the hyphen, not underscore). Similarly for morning (M-init), afternoon (A-init), evening (E-init) and night (N-init).

Playing no sounds for a period
===================
Should you wish, for example, the emitter to make no sound at night, simply make sure there are no files with the letter N before the underscore (_) in the Contents tab.

Note on SL day and night
================
SL day does not correspond at all to SL time. In fact, in a period of 24 hours, the sun rises and sets in SecondLife six times. So each SL solar "day" is equal to four hours on our RL clocks. SL night lasts just over one hour, and SL day lasts slightly under 3 hours. This script uses the height of the SL sun to calculate the time of day, and does not depend on the SL or RL clock at all.

If you "force sun" in your client, this does not affect the actual height of the SL sun, but only its appearance in your client. This script cannot take account of any forced sun settings in your client.