Biophony 3.0 turns your iPhone or iPad into a pocket bioacoustics field lab: record wildlife with a live spectrogram, schedule dawn-chorus sessions, import files from other recorders, box calls on the spectrogram, measure the soundscape with standard acoustic indices, and export everything in formats researchers already use. Everything runs on the device.
NEW IN 3.0
- Pre-roll: keep up to 10 seconds from before you tap Record, so the call that made you reach for the phone is in the file.
- Live markers: tap the flag while recording to mark a moment; markers are saved with the recording.
- Recording schedules: record on a duty cycle (for example 1 minute every 10 minutes, up to 288 times), starting now, at a set time, or before or after local sunrise or sunset calculated on the device.
- Import: bring in WAV, AIFF, M4A, MP3 or FLAC files from autonomous recorders, handheld recorders or other apps. Embedded GUANO metadata, recorder comments and date-time file names set the recording time and location.
- Box annotations: drag a time–frequency box around a call, label it, play just that selection, and read its peak frequency and level. Export a tab-separated selection table or a label track.
- Acoustic indices: ACI, ADI, AEI, BI, NDSI and acoustic entropy (H), computed segment by segment for recordings of any length, with a tappable timeline chart and a long-term spectral average. Parameters follow published defaults and are written into every export.
- Soundscape composition: an optional breakdown into biophony (animals), geophony (wind, rain, water) and anthrophony (people, engines) using Apple's built-in on-device sound classifier, with a list of sound events you can tap to hear. These are coarse, general sound classes, not species identification, and they can be wrong.
- Research package: one ZIP per recording with the audio (WAV files carry GUANO metadata), selection table, label track, indices CSV, soundscape CSV, metadata and a README describing every column.
- Spectrogram settings: FFT size, window, dynamic range and top frequency for detail views, plus 30-second paging through long recordings.
- Field Log: search, sort and filter by recorded, scheduled or imported, and share the whole log as CSV.
- Shortcuts: "Start a field recording" opens Biophony and starts recording from Siri, Spotlight or the Shortcuts app.
RECORD
Capture 24-bit PCM WAV at your device's full sample rate in measurement mode, so the microphone isn't coloured by automatic gain or equalisation. A live input meter shows level and peak, and Biophony shows roughly how many hours of storage remain. If a call or alarm interrupts a recording, the audio captured so far is saved.
LIVE SPECTROGRAM
A real Short-Time Fourier Transform (Hann-windowed FFT), drawn in real time on a log or linear frequency axis.
A CURATED REFERENCE LIBRARY
83 openly licensed bird, amphibian and insect recordings with taxonomy checked against GBIF, each fully credited inside the app.
A/B COMPARISON AND HONEST MATCHING
Compare any two clips side by side with dominant frequency, centroid, bandwidth, roll-off, flatness and pulse rate. "Match this window" ranks the reference library by spectral-envelope similarity to guide your own judgement. Biophony does not claim to identify species.
SURVEY NOTEBOOK
Log listening visits with site, method, conditions, effort and your own labels; compare repeat visits; export CSV or JSON.
PRIVATE BY DESIGN
- Works completely offline
- No account, no subscription, no cloud
- No analytics or tracking
- Recordings, annotations, analysis results and any optional location stay on your device unless you export them
Pay once. Use it anywhere, with or without signal.
ABOUT THE DATA
The bundled reference recordings come from Wikimedia Commons under CC0, Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) and public-domain terms. Every recording, its author and its licence are listed in the About screen.
