Send Audio

Summary: We currently only support receiving data on hard drives that have been shipped to us.

Introduction

The Ecosounds website is designed to manage a large amount of acoustic data. Data is arranged into projects and sites, representing logical collections of geographical locations. This data is in the form of audio files in various formats.

For these reasons, we currently do not offer a means to upload audio files directly through this website:

  • The size of the audio files added to this website usually exceeds the amount that can be easily uploaded through typical residential internet connections
  • Manual inspection of data allows us to apply quality control to incoming data
  • Most projects require collaboration and allowing web-based upload would bypass our typical collaboration points with research scientists
  • And finally, we just haven’t made a web-based uploader yet

The preferred method of uploading audio is to mail USB drives, SD cards, or hard drives to us.

If you have a small (less than 1GB) collection of audio files you would like to upload, please contact us and we can discuss other ways to upload the files. For example, via SFTP or sharing cloud storage links.

If have a large collection of data and you are located at a high bandwidth site, connected by AARNET then it is possible for us to organise direct transfers. Again, please contact us.

For all standard upload scenarios, please read the guidelines below.

Feel free to contact us even if you have audio recordings that differ from the guidelines below, but you would still like them uploaded to the website. We are always interested in expanding the applications for our acoustic analysis work.

Sending Audio Files

1. Types of audio recordings

This website is specifically designed for long duration audio recordings. We prefer audio recordings that:

  • are from 1 hour up to 1 day in duration
    • We have a strong preference for fewer files that are larger in size
  • are not trophy calls
    • We prefer audio recorded using an omnidirectional microphone, passively collected
    • We do not cater for
      • recordings directed at a sound source
      • that use shotgun microphones
      • that feature only one vocalisation
      • that have been recorded on a personal device
  • have not been sampled or otherwise modified after being recorded
  • cover long time periods (e.g. months or years)
  • are uncompressed or compressed in a lossless way
  • and are in one of the following formats:
Codec Extension MimeType Minimum sample rate Other requirements
WAVE .wav audio/wav 8 kHz 16-bit, PCM
WAC .wac   8 kHz We generally prefer WAC-0 encoding
FLAC .flac audio/x-flac, audio/flac 8 kHz  
Ogg .ogg, .oga, .opus audio/ogg, audio/opus 8 kHz The inner audio codec must be supported in this table
WebM .webm audio/webm 8 kHz  
MP3 .mp3 audio/mpeg 8 kHz use the highest bit rate possible - 320kbps is preferred

2. Information and organisation

We require a range of information to be able to include audio recordings on this website. We need information about you and how the audio files were collected.

  • Contact information for you. This is for internal use only and will be kept private.
    • return mailing address for devices mailed to us
    • your email (and optionally phone number)
    • URL for the project
    • institution name and address
  • Attribution and copyright details

3. Projects and Sites

Please group the recordings into projects and sites.

Projects are logical collections of sites (e.g. recordings made for one research activity, or recordings aiming to detect the presence of a particular species).

Sites are geographical locations of study. They represent a location where a sensor was deployed.

We recommend you make your projects and sites on Ecosounds. After that you can either:

  • restructure your audio files, so the directories clearly map to projects and sites
  • include a data file that tells us which directories map to which projects and sites

3. Shipping

When you’ve prepared the audio recordings, package the devices to send us securely. We recommend plenty of shock absorption and to pack boxes/pouches so that nothing can move during transportation.

We recommend using the exFAT filesystem on your storage device—it is supported by all recent operating systems.

Please only send us copies of audio files - keep a copy of all data you send us. Our postal address is:

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