Dear colleagues, I've been managing an assortment of AudioMoth collections and found it very helpful to be able to read the recording metadata from the file itself. I've written a Python tool to automatically extract the metadata and thought it could be helpful to the wider AudioMoth community. It is available at https://github.com/mbsantiago/metamoth.
The code is open-source and still in development but hopefully helpful. Contributions are more than welcome! In particular, I am looking for recordings from different firmware versions to test the tool on.
In developing the tool I found that the way AudioMoth devices store metadata changes from version to version. As the amount of AudioMoth recordings increases and are shared across diverse datasets it is important to safeguard the recording metadata and make sure that it will be easy to manage in the future. I believe standardizing the metadata format, having guidelines on how to expand its features, including the firmware version in the metadata, and designing it with a focus on (computer) readability, would be helpful in this regard.
Many thanks! Santiago
the GUANO defined standard format for embedding metadata in .wav files is commonly used, reasonably widely recognised and quite versatile, allowing vendor specific fields to be defined where predefined fields are not sufficient.