Improvements to audio and video tagging: zoom, attributes, search, pinning

Audio tagging improvements

Zoom

We have added the ability to Zoom into a recording. This is useful if you're having trouble isolating the sound to mark it, and on long recordings where the spectrogram may be crushed up. To zoom in, click the  symbol on the bottom right of the spectrogram. The white bars on the timeline show the portion of the spectrogram that is currently visible. You can adjust the level of zoom by moving these. To zoom out again click the  symbol on the bottom right.

Attributes

We have added the ability to optionally tag calls as either male/female or adult/juvenile. When we have enough data we will build models to distinguish gender and age if possible.

More variants and non bird sounds

In our initial release we only included tags for the top level species. We've now included many more variants. We've also added a number of non-bird sounds including sheep, dog, wind, rain, deer, insect, mammal, static, vehicle, and other, as a general catch all. If there are any other sounds you would like to tag then please let us know and we'll add them.

Pinning tags

The drop down list of tags is large - we recommend using the search functionality to find the tag you're looking for. The most used tags are shown as buttons at the top - but you can control this by "pinning" tags. To do this, just select the tag and then click the blue bin button .  The pinned tags will then be shown as buttons. The use of pins makes the tagging process a little more efficient.

Search for tags

We've added the ability to be able to search for audio tags. So if you want to find recordings where we have automatically identified morepork then you can do this on the recordings page. Select the tag from the Tagged as drop down box on the bottom right and press the search button.

Minor improvements and bug fixes

Various other improvements and bug fixes include.

• clicking on tag again will play sound again
• The time is now shown at the bottom of the spectrogram 
• We now show an interactive map below the Cacophony Index showing where the bird monitor is located.
  
• We have fixed a bug that meant the Cacophony Index didn't show when you navigated to another recording using the buttons on the top right.

Video tagging improvements

We have made one change that have been asked for often by our clients and we've added automatic stations .

Control which buttons you see

It can be quite a painful process if you are tagging animals that are not one of the five quick access buttons: you have to select other, click the drop down, select your tag and then press ok. If you have a commonly used tag that isn't one of the five buttons at the top, you can now create a button for it by using the pin functionality. Click other, select your tag and then press the pin icon , a button for that tag will now appear for you. This button will only appear for you on the device on which you do the pinning. If you use another browser or another device you will need to do the pinning again.

Automatic stations

Stations (named locations) are now created automatically when a device uploads a recording in a new location.  If a device uploads a recording in a location within 30m of one that has been used before, the recording is assigned to the existing station. This paves the way to make viewing and reporting on recordings location-centric instead of device centric.

Group admins now have the ability to rename stations (please do this for the automatically generated station names).  The ability to do bulk importing of stations from a CSV file has been temporarily removed, pending more UI reorganization.

See the full release notes.