Hello everyone,
For French scientific monitoring, we have to program the audiomoths as follows:
sleep duration : 0 s
Recording duration : 300s
all the night (6pm - 8am)
So we create files of 300 s (5 min) in continuous recording.
Unfortunately I get files not necessarily "in the cycle" :
As you can see, the first file is correct: 7:10 p.m. to 7:15 p.m., but there is a "jump" from 7:15 p.m. to 7:25 p.m.
(if I understand it is the second of 7.15pm which causes the "problem"). The problem is that I lose the 5 min between 7.20pm and 7.25pm.
Do you have a solution to overcome this problem?
Thanks in advance!
Adrien CHARBONNEAU
Maybe the 0s sleep trips things up? What happens if you program it with 5 seconds of sleep and a recording duration of 295 seconds?
Wim van Dam
Thank you!
Indeed it works, I think it also works with 1 sec of sleep (to try).
Adrien CHARBONNEAU
Yes, this happens as the AudioMoth doesn't have time to open and close the file in time and then is out of sync with the schedule. Its solution is to skip a recording to get back on schedule. We're are going to change this policy so that it just makes a shorter recording in order to get back of schedule, and have also increased the minimum sleep time that is possible to set in the configuration app to 5 seconds. The other option is to disable the sleep / record cycle and record the whole recording period as a single file. Alex
Thank you Alex, yes indeed, the second solution is very interesting!
The minimum sleep time has been increased to 5sec in the latest configuration app (1.3.2)
Thanks for your reply, I understand.
If you record a single long file you can split it into short individual wav files using Kaleidoscope from Wildlife Acoustics. Free download from www.wildlifeacoustics.com/account/downloads/kaleidoscope
Kaleidoscope will recognize the time in the AudioMoth filename and properly timestamp the resulting short files.
Another option we were thinking of would be to add a 'chop up' function to the config app so that you can record continuously so not lose any time between periods. The problem is really that the sleep function is being used to divide up large files which wasn't really the original intent.
Thank you very much David Lee! It's perfect.