I’m relatively new to iNaturalist, and have used it over the last few months, most days, and in general to post audio recordings of bird songs on my walks in my local (urban) area (I’m in the UK). Recently I’ve started taking stock of my and others’ audio recordings over the last few months, and I’…

[image] spiphany: I then have to extrapolate where the audio was recorded and manually add the time and place to the observation. This is also a bit of pain, but before or after you record you can always make an observation in the app and choose “No Media”. That will capture the date/time/loc…

See, that would imply having some degree of certainty that I am in fact going to make an observation out of any particular recording, which is usually not the case – I’ll often record a video or two when I hear something interesting, but when I listen to the recordings afterwards, a certain portion …

This covers the entire subject matter of audio observation :)

I am grateful to the Identifiers who work with sound observations; they’ve broadened my awareness of the birds around me. I’m not bird song savvy at all. But, I started making the occasional bird recording over the last two years or so. The INaturalist iOS app sound observation facility makes it v…

My camera doesn’t record GPS so sometimes I will take a quick usually poor quality shot with my phone to record it, but often it gets it wrong (don’t have photo app open long enough?) so I end up having to look at satellite images to figure it out. I will usually be doing an eBird list at the same t…

[image] buteobuteo2: I think spectrograms do show something unique about the bird that helps others learn to recognise it in person. I could agree if the average person could understand spectrograms. But most birders would not be able to look at a spectrogram and “hear” the song in their head…

[image] teellbee: I’ve been using iNat iOS app for sound recordings for the ease of use, but I wonder if I should not? Either is fine! But almost without fail the bird/frog/insect inevitably goes silent for a long period of time as soon as I start recording(:rage:) and I personally don’t want…

When you upload sound recorded directly in the app (iOS), if you’re not satisfied with the quality or length, you can download the audio file, edit it in audacity or whatever, and re-upload it. To do this, go to the iNat web site, right click on the audio playback display on the observation page to …

[image] jasonhernandez74: I could agree if the average person could understand spectrograms. But most birders would not be able to look at a spectrogram and “hear” the song in their head. In my own work, Icterids make a call that sounds very similar to juvenile Black Rails. They are very hard…

[image] wildwestnature: As an identifier, you can download other people’s audio this way and enhance/normalize it so that you can identify it more accurately (just as you can download other’s pics and enhance them). This would be very helpful. I didn’t realize it was possible to do that. I gu…

Audio recordings of bird song/calls

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Automatically add a spectrogram view to observations with sounds Feature Requests under-review	53	7287	September 18, 2025
Question About Audio Observations General question , audio-observations , sounds	17	595	April 24, 2025
Something needs to be done about long audio recordings General	55	1510	June 15, 2026
Habitat shots acceptable with audio observations? General	74	3129	October 2, 2021
Screenshot from a bird voice identification app as a photo General question	8	1381	June 22, 2023

Audio recordings of bird song/calls

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