The Moth Family (totally not a mafia name) includes the AudioMoth, the HydroMoth, the MicroMoth (µMoth), and the AudioMoth USB Microphone. First created by Open Acoustic Devices, these little acoustic loggers have been deployed in caves to listen to bats, left in coral reefs to monitor population density, and rainforests to track human activities (like logging or poaching).
There are a lot of software options available to help you process and analyze the data from your Moth. Some are user-made, some are free, and some require payment. Groupgets is compiling this list for our customers. We are not recommending or suggesting the use of any of these above the others; each software option will have its pros and cons, and it is up to you to decide which will better fit the nature of your project.
Try out AudioMoth Play - https://t.co/8bcNWReWDA - to generate a video from the original WAV. This one is created from your SoundCloud file. Very strange sound! pic.twitter.com/GWCqnIFCm1
— Alex Rogers (@alex_rogers_cs) February 21, 2024
Creator-Made:
It would be remiss of me to compile this list and not include the AudioMoth Live software offered by the AudioMoth’s creators, Open Acoustic Devices. It can display a scrolling waveform and spectrogram or even apply a bat detector to the data. Example above comes from a tweet by AudioMoth creator Alex Rogers.
User-Made:
Made by nilomr, Fieldtools is free and has three commands that allow you to listen to SD cards and organize content, format multiple cards at once, and check data on recorder deployment, among other things.
This free software, created by Nathan Wolek, helps rename your AudioMoth files, generate basic spectrograms, images, and slideshows. However, Wolek warns at the top of the GitHub page: These scripts were designed to work with recordings from an early version of the AudioMoth firmware. More recent versions no longer use the hexadecimal file names (e.g., 5EC5A158.WAV).
Ah, the super-cute, not at all blood-curdling nocturnal flight call of a Barn Owl passing over my #audiomoth in @FlamboroughBird village the other night. Like a lullably, isn't it? 😱#nocmig @YCNature pic.twitter.com/DHKqKhAqqa
— Mark James Pearson (@Markthebirder) June 13, 2023
Free:
Librosa is a python package for music and audio analysis. It also helps create a music information retrieval system.
This link takes you to a page with four applications listed. All four are free, and have different functions:
- Sonic Visualizer - visualize, analyze, and annotate audio recordings
- Sonic Lineup - visualize multiple audio files
- Tony - designed for vocal recordings for pitch and note transcriptions
- Sonic Annotator - like Sonic Visualizer, but non-interactive and intended for “batch audio feature extraction”
Crowsetta is a Python tool for annotating animal vocalizations and other bioacoustic data.
The Triton software package was developed for evaluation of long duration acoustic recordings and is from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.
Raven Lite offers the ability to see your recordings as spectrograms and waveforms. It was built with students, educators, and hobbyists in mind.
Arbimon boasts a free platform that offers AI algorithms, unlimited data storage, unlimited users for your projects, and automated insights. It allows you to create visualizations based on your biodiversity data to track your impact.
BirdNet, also found here is used for single audio files, or even large amounts of audio data. BirdNet is a research platform designed by Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Chemnitz University of Technology with the purpose of recognizing and identifying birds by sound.
One BirdNet user Mason Fidino, PhD (tweet below) says, “We're getting somewhere around 50% more detections out of BirdNet due to the noise removal!”
Been working with @ms_woodchuck on removing some urban noise from our audiomoth recordings before putting them through @BirdNET_App via birdnetlib in Python. Seems pretty promising so far, definite blue jay in this recording here. pic.twitter.com/B416Ky9s2t
— Mason Fidino, PhD (@masonfidino) April 11, 2023
Bat detection/classification:
Quite a few of our AudioMoth users deploy their acoustic logger in caves to listen to bats, so here are a few free software options geared towards our little flying friends.
Titley Scientific brings to you Anabat Insight, an analysis software that can streamline how you collect, analyze and report your bat call data.
The link takes you to the free version, but there is the option to purchase the Anabat Insight full license
.
BatExplorer offers automatic bat call detection, along with organization and classification tools, and it will even help suggest which species of bat you’re listening to.
BatDetect, created by Macaodha, is a python code for the detection of bat echolocation within audio recordings.
SonoBat has free and paid versions. It offers the ability to render sonograms, and gives access to classification algorithms built off decades of expert audio classification expertise.
BatScope allows you to transfer from BatLogger, and open Raven, as well as view GPS data in Google Earth. It also allows you to “play back your recordings in frequency division, heterodyne or real time mode.” More info can be found through the link.
Thanks to @AudioMoth I was able to detect my first ever greater horseshoe bat recently, and I've barely begun looking into the thousands of files it recorded over the course of a week! This peculiar-looking bat has a very unique flat-frequency ultrasound call when hunting pic.twitter.com/NJYPDie9Ot
— Lanius (@General_JWJ) May 5, 2023
Paid:
Raven Pro is packed full of features, including the ability to view waveforms, spectrograms, and spectrogram slices (which you can customize with different colormaps). It allows you to open sound files saved in WAV, AIF, MP3, and FLAC formats, and lets you switch between your frequently used configurations so that you don’t have to bother with multiple parameters.
Price: Lifetime commercial license $800, 1 year for non-profits $100, 1 year for students $100, and 1 semester for students $50
Raven Exhibit is geared towards making visual displays for public places, such as museums, zoos, or nature centers.
Price: One year $500, five years $2,000, lifetime $5,000
TS2 is for audio editing, including the capacity to timestretch, transform, and manipulate audio recordings.
Price: $249
Avisoft allows you to filter out noise from your recordings to focus on what's important,make spectrograms, and even has octave analysis for noise level measurements.
Price: €2700 ($2920), educational license €2100 ($2271), and there is a free Demo/Lite version
Kaleidoscope Pro is a subscription based software program for identification of bird songs, frog calls, and bat echolocations. It provides cluster analysis, and sound level analysis (including third octave band), as well as cloud storage access. There is the option of a free trial.
Price: $399
Do you use a different software that you swear by? Let us know, and we are happy to include it in the list. We are always looking to assist our customers, whether they be scientists, researchers, conservationists, hobbyists, or anything in between.