Automatically add a spectrogram view to recorded audio like eBird. It makes for much more accurate bird identifications. There are vocal characteristics visible in spectrograms that are difficult to pick out by ear.

Thanks for clarifying. It’s too easy to take your word for policy. I am happy to see you’re looking into this. Back on the original topic, it looks like you’d be all set for audible sound files (max. 44 kHz). You could defer handling of higher sampling rates to whenever the tools become available.…

Any progress on this? I’ve recently upped my field recording game a little. The iNat app now integrates with my audio recording app (RecForge) mostly seamlessly so that most repeating calls can get reliably captured. I’ve also been playing with BirdNet, mentioned above, with satisfying results. I f…

[image] taitsougstad: Any progress on this? Nope, because [image] kueda: That presents two problems There’s clearly no data above ~65 kHz, but how can I know that programmatically so I could automatically crop it to a range that has data? Not seeing that in the ffprobe output, but mayb…

Thanks, @kueda , I know you guys have plenty to work on :) I also hope someone can help out. Not sure where to recruit from within the iNat community, but maybe there would be some willingness to collaborate from the folks at Cornell Lab of Ornithology or Macauley Library? Maybe Wildlife Acoustics, …

Maybe have an “Evidence of Organism” toggle for everything that’s not a photo of the animal itself, and then exclude that from CV learning?

I don’t have experience processing sound but I’m wondering if bat recording observations are rare enough relative to other kinds of sound that it could default to eBird-like settings and then have a button to show the full spectrogram? (analogous to the zoom/brighten buttons for images) I’m not sure…

@kueda : My opinion based on somewhat limited knowledge of ML and computer vision is that you already have that problem with “garbage photos” - ones that are misidentified, ones that have insufficient resolution or clarity, ones where the specimen is very small, ones where multiple species are depict…

Not to beat a dead horse, but I thought the AI response to my sparrow song was funny: [image] Like it or not the AI is picking up on spectrograms, and as of now bats beat birds in the spectrogram-to-photograph ratio. Perhaps “spectrogram” could be established as a “pseudo taxon” that the AI learn…

[image] jrcagle: what happens now – one posts a sound recording, and within a couple of years someone else finds it. my experience is that birds are identified fairly quickly on iNaturalist, if they can be identified easily, even if the only evidence is audio. [image] jrcagle: Imagine a …

I like this idea a lot. Having spectrograms attached is really useful, and if displaying them from the .wav file isn’t possible, this seems like a reasonable solution.

Automatically add a spectrogram view to observations with sounds

Feature Requests

Topic		Replies	Views
Spectrogram browser extension for iNaturalist - feedback welcome! General web , third-party-tools	62	1785	February 25, 2026
Audio recordings of bird song/calls General	54	4807	May 9, 2023
Question About Audio Observations General question , audio-observations , sounds	18	478	June 23, 2025
Paste image onto observation? General	9	513	November 2, 2024
Screenshot from a bird voice identification app as a photo General question	9	1343	August 21, 2023

Automatically add a spectrogram view to observations with sounds

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