Cheap Birds of the World 3 CD-ROM Set (Jewel Case) (Software) (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me) Price

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Customer Reviews of Birds of the World 3 CD-ROM Set (Jewel Case)

For the birds?
If you want to learn ABOUT birds, this software can be a useful teaching tool. And it's certainly not going to break the bank. But really, this is a mish-mosh of several items; a bird encyclopedia, birdsongs on CD-Rom, and a directory of Australian birds (hmmm, how many of us are going to be lucky enough to travel down under to see a kookaburra?) It looks as if someone took bird database information, some of it rather long in the tooth and a bit of this and that and threw together this set.

If you want to LEARN birds, identifying which ones are in your back yard or out on a field trip, this software is disappointing. It's not nearly as useful as a good field manual and even frustrating to use. And there are NOT enough birdsongs to make it comprehensive, though we did identify one scary night-screamer that had us perplexed for quite a while--it was a kind of owl that made a most eerie call in the night and we did manage to identify it using the birdcall portion of the software.

In summary; not a bad piece of educational software for the price, but not the ultimate in a bird reference for your computer.

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Good and bad points
The program runs well and the bird calls are great, but most birdwatchers see a bird, then want to look it up to see what it is. With this program you must know the name or at least the family group of the bird to look it up. It would be much improved if they had thumbnails from which to select a bird to learn about. Good program for people with previous ornothology knowledge, but kind of useless for the everyday bird watcher.

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Where do I begin?
Where do I begin to tell you how much I hate this product?

Should I start with its complete lack of any categorical organization to simplify the search method other than an alphabetical listing of hundreds of Latin names and a "search" function that requires too many steps?

Or how about the fact that the only online "help" (a term I'll use loosely here) is through the tedious audio that sounds more like a promotional demo than instructions?

Or how about the fact that this product looks very much like something that was created back on the bad old DOS days, and only "upgraded" since then by the random pasting in of some useless film montages of birds flying by? Or the fact that you can't even navigate to the program with the Windows taskbar (further proof that it's just a re-packaged DOS product)?

No, I think I should complain first about the fact that the actual "descriptive" material (another loosely used term here) is so terse as to be virtually useless.

I have been a bird lover all my life. I figured "how can I not love a CD about birds?" Well, this is my answer. This product is so user-vicious that not only is it a waste of precious disk space (Oh, did I forget to mention that even though you MUST install it on your hard drive, it still won't work without the CD? Sorry.), but it's a waste of the paper it was wrapped in. They should have saved the tree for birds to nest in.

I also get the distinct feeling that the people who threw this together had no concept of what a bird lover might be interested in; instead, it's just a regurgitation of species definitions with such rudimentary "illustrations" that they're completely useless (again, probably a throw-back to the DOS era). There are photos included too, but those are scenic at best and virtually useless for any purposes of identification. And even with the CD, they take forever to load.

And it's a shame too, because any good VB programmer could fix half the embarrassingly obvious interface problems in this program, but they obviously never even bothered to check before rushing it out to market.

If anybody can recommend a good product, please email me. But do NOT buy this one. It's so bad that you might end up losing your interest in birds.

Save your money. For the price of just shipping this crummy CD, you could just buy a good guide book (the Golden and Petersen series books are great, with illustrations and explanations that actually help), stick it in your pocket, and go out and enjoy the birds.