During audio recordings, the target species (example, an Eastern Phoebe), may only call a few times across a prolonged time period, while a whole other slew of birds, frogs and crickets are singing across that same recording, for the observer, remembering all the timestamps that the target species made a sound at to put in the notes after recoding can be hard if it was over a longer time period.
It would be nice if we had the ability to take note of and type the timestamp right as we hear the target species during an audio recording, and this would make it easier for identifiers to skip to those timestamps written in notes instead of listening to a very long recording.
Another idea is just a button to hit when you hear the target species that automatically takes the timestamp and adds it to notes, but I’d imagine this tool should be kept pretty simple.
My experience with recording on a cellphone is that any movement (finger tapping on the screen, moving an arm, taking a step, turning around) produces a noise that is generally stronger than what I’m trying to record. So I probably wouldn’t want to use something that asks me to interact with the phone in any way while it’s recording. Maybe right after the recording, that could be possible or useful, but not during.
I have a sound recorder less than a decimeter long, and while it doesn’t have a touchscreen, I get the same problem with the stop button. Here’s one of my latest audio observations: spring peepers. At the end, you can hear two clicks, both from pushing the button. The first click turned the display on; the second turned the device off.
That observation was done in a moving car, so there’s no way I could have made any notes even with a touchscreen. A timestamp feature in the website might be useful, but I get by fine by stopping playing the sound and writing the time in the notes.
How are you defining a “prolonged time period”? If there is a long gap between calls (say 30 seconds or more), it probably makes more sense for the observer to split the audio recording into multiple shorter files before uploading.
This is one thing I love about eBird. When you upload sounds media one of the fields they want is “other species recorded” along with the main species.
Well, that would be nice but there is no ability to do that natively in the mobile app. I don’t even know how I would do that if it was recorded in iNat mobile, would you have to screen record it? I don’t see any option to export it out from iNat mobile app.
The everyday user is not going to want to go through the hassle of exporting that somehow and then uploading it on a laptop because you can’t upload a sound recording you have already made into the mobile app (as far as I know).
Looking forward to see how audio observations evolve over time, right now they are a huge hassle.
Maybe a dumbed down spectogram or something would help to be able to “see” sound across a timeframe, which would then make it easier to go back and review what timestamp notes to add, thx
There’s the iNatSpectro browser extension that could help with that. Not at the time of recording, but after the sound has been uploaded. And third-party of course, but that’s all we have as long as the respective feature request is still out there.