Description of need:
Birds often produce a short vocalization, which you did not record, then go quiet! The solution is to have an app store a 10 or 20 second rolling audio buffer, such that the observer can click a button to record starting 10 seconds in the past. This avoids pressing record a few seconds after you heard a bird, only to wait 60 seconds for no sound or to eventually hear a sound but have a ton of non-target audio preceding it. Iâm considering developing an app specifically for this, but would prefer direct integration into the iNaturalist mobile apps.
Feature request details: Feature: each mobile app (Andriod, iOS) has two Audio recording buttons: one starts recording now, one starts the recording 10 seconds in the past.
Implementation: (when microphone is enabled and audio buffer is enabled in settings) the app stores a 10-second (or perhaps 15 or 20 second) rolling audio buffer. When [REC -10s] button is clicked, the app takes audio already existing in the buffer then starts recording as normal. I can assist with implementation if desirable.
FWIW, if the iNaturalist app ever starts recording without me specifically authorizing each recording, I will delete the app from my phone. Thatâs spyware. If someone wants to use a dedicated, always-on audio recorder on their phone, thatâs up to them. But please donât integrate a feature like this into iNat.
I think this is a pretty cool idea for a standalone app, which you can just start up when youâre out in the field to make sure you donât miss any sounds. That said, I donât think this needs to (or should) be integrated into iNat.
This could possibly work if there was an option to start a rolling buffer only after you hit the microphone button, so that you could hit the âcaptureâ button as soon as you here your target vocalizing, and capture the target vocalization plus 5-10 seconds of sound on either side of it. Perhaps easier and more likely to be implemented would be features that allow users to edit the length of recordings, so that they could record for as long as it takes to capture what they are interested in, and then remove the earlier parts of the recording.
However, with iNat having previously been reluctant to include any photo editing features it seems unlikely that they would prioritize any changes to how audio are captured.
This sounds like a big project to add on to iNat. But if you love audio recording and are willing to walk around with a dedicated recording device, you can just record everything in the field and pull it out later at home. A Tascam DR-05X or Zoom H1n are $100-ish recorders that you could probably figure out a way to run for the duration of a bird trip. A lav mic clipped on a hat brim or something like that, where there isnât much rustling, might work. Then there is a program called BirdNET which can analyze audio and help you pull out clips later. You could also drop $300 on a Birdweather PUC and just take that everywhere with you. No super elegant options, but definitely some clunky ones!
For a minute I was very confused as to why someone would make a Merlin feature request in the iNat forum.
I can see a feature like this being useful for when one has Merlin open and in the foreground (Or maybe a button to manually start audio buffering in the background while one has eBird in the foreground) but itâs a bit too ambitious and specific for iNat.
My camera has a feature that is thematically similar to this, and I like it very much. When this feature is turned on and the shutter button half way pressed, the camera takes and deletes a series of five photos per second. When the shutter button is fully depressed, it saves the five photos from the previous second. It is very useful when, for example, waiting for a bird to come flying out of a nest box.
I agree with the above comments that this doesnât really fit as part of the iNaturalist app, but something along those lines for audio would be a great stand alone app or addition to Merlin.
This kind of features has been gaining momentum in many cameras in the past few years. Some of the newest pro level models have added extra high speed internal buffer chips that will even cycle through high speed seconds of RAW data and high rez video continuously until you press.
I guess even âdumb-luckâ can be pretty well purchased now â says the guy with a humble 10 year old used camera with an equally old manual lens.
Envy? Meh. Itâs still a lot of fun. Dumb luck? I seem to have a lot of the latter to compensate for the former.
I donât see why adding a permission option to the app to deny it from uploading local audio until you have a chance to review and maybe trim it couldnât be too big of a safe option to add.
Mine is a Nikon P900, a glorified point and shoot thatâs been available since 2015. So while I have no doubt more recent cameras do this better, the feature has existed for over a decade.
I guess with smart glasses, the tech exists, but itâs not widespread yet. I guess it could record everything you see and hear. Maybe it could save it for a few minutes, and then delete it, in order to save storage space on your account.
I think it might be called âcontinuous recording with overwriteâ, AKA loop recording? I think dashcams and bodycams work in a similar way.
If a taxon observation suddenly happens and you werenât ready with your phone, you still capture it.
If you make an app that does this well, and makes it easy to share the recorded clip to the iNat app (if feasible, with date/time/location pre-filled as when importing a photo), I would definitely use it, and probably be willing to make a purchase for it.
Right now Iâm using Birdnet, which does keep a running buffer (complete with live sonogram) when you have it open AND on the home screen, and in record mode, and allows to you to choose what to keep by making a selection on the sonogram. But if it could be doing that in the background, that would be much more useful. And clips shared from Birdnet to iNat loose the date/time/location data, even though Birdnet does record it.
I agree with others that this might feel like bloat if included in the iNat app itself (though I probably would use the feature if no other app had it). But I think the privacy concerns are based on a misunderstanding - this is easily solved by making it an opt-in only feature, not to mention that mobile OSâs these days donât allow microphone access in the first place unless youâve specifically enabled it.
This kind of feature would normally be opt-in only. And iNat canât access your microphone at all until and unless you grant it microphone permissions, so if you donât use iNat to make recordings anyway, the feature would also be blocked by your phoneâs operating system.
The problem OP is talking about is that sometimes a recording will start right after the bird made the sound, because the person recording it, for whatever reason, wasnât fast enough to actually catch the birdâs brief vocalization.
That said, Iâd agree with the general consensus of âmaybe notâ. Though it could be interesting as a standalone app, yeah.
You can already upload files from Merlin to iNat, though not directly. Merlin stores to a local folder in the phone, so it is a matter of picking the right file from the list.
Since Merlin is an app more or less created for eBird (and it doesnât even have a function to export files to eBird itself), I doubt they have a lot of incentive to put effort on exporting to a third party database.
That said - Until iNat implements something similar to what eBird did very recently (automatically normalising recording volumes on upload) I would discourage doing that. It is very hard to identify audios on iNat if the user doesnât normalise the volume, they are usually incredibly quiet as phones are designed to record your voice as you speak from mere centimeters away.