@arborsphere Higher quality is not superfluous if you want to work with these sound recordings. The photos and sounds recordings on iNaturalist do and will continue to have research value beyond just confirming an identification. The wav format is preferred and encouraged by the research community because it retains more information than mp3.
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@cullen - I agree completely, but I don’t agree that its essential for everyone to submit all their audio stuff as wav files. For my purposes, they serve only to corroborate an iNat observation, just like a photo. For that, an MP3 is fine and also lets me include tags (which you can’t do with wav files). I similarly crop, reduce, tag, and further compress my jpegs before uploading. Again, they’re still good enough to corroborate an observation. I’m not worried about iNat’s bandwidth and servers. Its more of a courtesy to other users as my stuff loads really quick into your browser or app. As @charlie mentioned, not everyone has a fast connection, massive amounts of storage space, or unlimited bandwidth. Its also a little bit about uglifying my files so they’re less attractive to pirates. All that said, if someone wants to analyze or otherwise use my media files for a particular research effort or publication, they’re welcome to reach out and contact me about obtaining the hi-res versions of my audio and image files. The internet doesn’t get that stuff from me by default.
Btw, for anyone who cares, I use Wavelab for editing/processing my audio. Bought it because I’m also a musician. It works very well, but is probably overkill for anyone who just needs/wants to do some basic editing like trimming or fades.
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