Known Problems

known-problems #

A collection of well-known problems that occur in passive acoustic monitors.

Why #

Sharing information about issues with acoustic sensors can be time saving for other people. Sharing the workarounds and tools to deal with the issues listed here means people won’t have to spend time trying ot figure out to fix the issues themselves. Moreover, a central and technical description of problems can be useful when communicating with vendors about their product and possible issues.

This repository is not intended to be an indictment. Any technology used at scale has problems: the number of known faults does not make one vendor better than another!

Status #

This was written from our own experience with acoustic sensors, but we expect contributions and additional resources/information to deal with the issues and problems listed here. We are also working on solutions, developing tools to solve them or contacting vendors to inform them of the practical aspects of their products.

Please let us know if you’re affected by a problem! We appreciate sample files demonstrating the problems as well!

Contributions are welcome and should be done through the issues tab

or by making a change through a pull-request.

Disclaimer: some of the information here may be out of date! If you have better information then please let us know!

Goal #

It is our eventual goal that most of the problems documented can either be fixed, or at least detected and omitted from large collections of ecoacoustics audio files.

EMU (the Ecoacoustic Metadata Utility) is a tool that fixes some of the problems documented.

Problems by Vendor/Manufacturer #

Generic problems with files #

These a problems that are common to audio files but are not associated with any vendor.

Support #

This This project is supported by the Open Ecoacoustics project. The Open Ecoacoustics Logo