Hello Open Acoustic Devices,

I wanted to get some clarification on a problem we have observed when using the Audiomoth to collect recordings in an outdoor natural area. We sample at 192kHz, 300s/300s record/sleep cycle, and equip our Audiomoths with 6 or 9 AA rechargeable batteries.

We have noticed that our Audiomoth sometimes changes mode during deployments and produces "empty" 488-byte files that do not contain data and are short. It goes into this mode and might generate 100s of such files and then comes back to generating normal files.

I am attaching a couple screenshots from previous deployments of the file explorer view alongside an exiftool-based readout of the file metadata. You can see the normal files will be generated before and after the error "488-byte" files. These problems persist in the same manner even to this day with new firmware and new Audiomoths.

I can generate a SUMMARY.CSV file if that is more helpful but I had the exiftool screenshots on me so I figured to show those first.

It is possible these are issues caused by water damage to the microphones but we just wanted clarity since we have not seen water damage cause temporary issues in a way that the Audiomoth can record normal files again after some time.

Thanks,

Aditya Krishna