I have been trying to help with bird audio identifications this past summer. I discovered that you can right-click on a recording in iNat and download it. Then, using Audacity (a free application) you can enhance recordings (apple files, WAV files and MP3 files). You can somewhat filter out noise and also increase the volume fairly easily. There are a lot of bad (phone) recordings out there especially from people who use Merlin. My biggest issue is with the ones that are 1 to 3 seconds. There almost always isn’t enough information recorded. But, there are also a lot of very good recordings on phones that just need a little bit of cleaning up. So, it’s worth the effort to download them and work with them a little bit. I also sort by Ascending to start with the older recordings.
And, thanks to a wonderful iNat user, wweellll, you don’t even need to download things and use Audacity. You can use this persons free website that was created to help clean-up recordings:
This works for videos and audio files.
I tried it with a very quiet Baltimore oriole recording I made.
The recording was noticeably improved. It was brighter. The surrounding bird songs were clearer. I think I “discovered” two or three birds in it that were too quiet to hear in the initial recording.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/quick-and-easy-tool-for-cleaning-up-audio-observations/65427