I wish sounds could edited and uploaded in-app. Using in-app sound recording doesn’t permit editing a recording, which you get lots of extraneous species or other noise from people to aircraft. So I use the a voice Memo app to record and edit. But the I have to send to myself by email so I can upload in the browser application. But the I won’t have metadata and have to have photo to use to capture that, deleting the photo after adding the sound recording to it… It’s a process but I get better recordings this way. It seems to me that INaturalist should be to use that voice memo app in an integrated way, and greatly improve and simplify making sound observations? Ideas? Feature request?
I assume you’re using an iOS device? There isn’t a central repository for sounds in iOS like there is for photos, so it’s a bit trickier. I think a possibility would be to add the ability to share a sound from Voice Memos to the iNaturalist app.
The Merlin app allows you to share sounds recordings directly to the iNat android app. However I don’t have much experience using it so I don’t know if the audio file can be edited, or whether this also applies to iOS, or whether Merlin app works without data/location!
It can’t be edited that I’ve seen. I have to edit on my computer and then upload from there. It is a bit of a pain.
Being able to input from files like other apps allow you to do would be easy/helpful. Then people could record with voice memos or another audio recording app and then save to files and upload from there instead of having to upload on the mobile website or use a computer, etc.
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This discussion is news to me because I can use my regular camera app for photo observations and then choose the appropriate file to upload in the iNaturalist app. I had assumed that audio observations would work the same way.
I’ve been using the BirdNET app (android) and it may work for you - it has a pretty robust recording functionality with manual gain control. Once you’ve recorded audio - can be any length, you select the interval to save or have it analyze. The share option will upload just that interval directly into iNat. If you upload in the field, iNat will use your current location.
I also use Audacity as req’d. I use it for Frogs and Insects too.
example (I also take a screenshot of the spectragram to include with the audio file)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/203051264
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I have a very clunky process. I take audio from videos and convert them into files and save those onto my phone. Then I go onto iNat on Safari on my phone and select the files, since you can’t upload files on the iPhone app. Then I upload them without location, date or an ID because I struggle to do that on Safari, so I very quickly go to the app and rush to add all of that info.
It feels a lot more complicated than it needs to be and I often avoid doing it, so now I have a massive backlog of short video clips saved to my phone that I need to turn into audio files to upload.
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