I assume there are calls and sounds that only the young make, like begging for food. When it comes to annotations i notice a large amount are completely blank and in particular the stage if life and gender. Since ive resently started recording audio of birds it made me extra curious about how much of the annotations can be figured out with just the sound. Knowing if its alive is a lot easier for sound lol. It would be interesting to see an experienced person working on adding those often missing annotations wouldnt it? Has anyone ever focused on something like this?
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In some cases only the male will sing. There are also juvenile begging calls. I haven’t focused on it as of yet though, so not skilled in it.
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I know male and female owls often have different calls.
Some of the recordings on Merlin are labeled male or female.
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Yes, juveniles will often have different calls. Usually the males sing, but sometimes females sing; both sexes call. In some species, such as the Carolina wren, both the male and female sing at the same time to form a duet. Telling the age or sex of the bird, however, is often difficult to the untrained ear, not to mention the fact that it can be hard to find a juvenile bird calling. You can use the fact that most juvenile birds don’t sound anything like the adults if you can hear them at all, as usually it’s only the adults making sounds to determine the relative age. For some birds, I believe this is possible, but difficult.
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Determining sex and life stage by call is possible in Mallards. The females have a louder and clearer quack while males are quieter and raspier. Downy young Mallards cheep rather than quack.
I haven’t had a chance to study the calls of other duck species, but I presume it’s a similar situation.
Though, we run into another issue with identifying Mallards by call alone; we can’t really rule out hybrids. In some areas, Mallard hybrids are common, so this is a big hurtle.
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I love Carolina wrens 
. Ive found additional difficulties with using sound for IDing male, female, age. For the first time i got to see a bluejay begging for food, adorable. Apparently its not only the young doing it but also adult females, occasionally males? Gotta love bluejays though, making things difficult for everyone while being so darn cute.
I would strongly discourage annotating sex based only on recordings if you did not personally see the bird singing/calling. In many species in temperate regions, (seemingly) only the males sing, but it is increasingly being found that females of many species do also sing, especially in the tropics. Female bird song is very understudied, and it would be circular to annotate all songs as male based on the assumption that only males sing - that assumption needs to be tested.
I would also avoid annotating life stage if you did not see the bird or the observer didn’t leave a note. The begging calls of of many juveniles are different than adult sounds, but we can only know that based on people making observations and directly seeing whether the bird is an adult or juvenile - otherwise we might miss interesting parts of bird biology (for example, female crows can make sounds that mimic juvenile begging calls, and it is an open question how many other species occasionally do that).
In this case, I’d say no data is better than data based only on assumptions. It is awesome that you are thinking about this, and I’d definitely encourage filling in those annotations whenever you are able to visually confirm - then those assumptions can get properly tested!