8
votes
Does anyone regularly use FLAC compression for their acoustic data?
I have worked with relatively large FLAC data sets (a few TB, not anywhere near 500 TB!) and been very happy with it/have no issues to report. I am not an engineer so am coming at this opinion from ...
- 3,567
8
votes
What Autonomous Recording Units (ARU) allow on-board compression?
For the Wildlife Acoustics SongMeter series, their firmware
"adds a WAV compression option called W4V that will record using various levels of compression to save card space. Resulting W4V files ...
- 3,398
8
votes
What Autonomous Recording Units (ARU) allow on-board compression?
Froniter Lab's BAR-LT supports lossless FLAC compression: https://www.frontierlabs.com.au/bar-lt
EDIT
I'll note we regularly see about 50% compression using FLAC. Not the best compression format (...
7
votes
Accepted
How, if at all, are you compressing your recordings?
There is a similar post about compression here with some helpful answers on different options & explanations of them.
Does the file format of audio recordings (e.g. .wav vs .mp3) matter if you are ...
- 3,398
7
votes
How, if at all, are you compressing your recordings?
I use the flac format for storage and the wav format for analysis. I jump from one to another using the function wav2flac in R (seewave package). In order for the function to work you need to install ...
- 1,544
7
votes
What Autonomous Recording Units (ARU) allow on-board compression?
I think you can use a .flac compression with the soundmeters from wildlife acoustics. They also allow you to choose bit depth. I don't really know about other recorders.
Also, .flac is a lossless ...
- 439
5
votes
Does anyone regularly use FLAC compression for their acoustic data?
Yes, I almost always store large acoustic files in FLAC. It's usually not an issue for smaller files of 10s or even 100s of GB, but files in the TB+ range get unwieldy fast. And moving them is like ...
- 296
4
votes
Accepted
What lossy compression is okay for marine sound?
In my personal experience with sperm whales' recordings (echolocation and coda clicks), the MP3 compression didn't affect the sound for ID purposes. But this may depend on the sound you are recordings ...
4
votes
Does anyone regularly use FLAC compression for their acoustic data?
FLAC is great. I hope to see more projects and application programs using it. Compressing takes a bit of CPU time but uncompressing is easy. Depending on noise level, I get a compression to about 1/2 ...
- 588
3
votes
How, if at all, are you compressing your recordings?
For archives we use FLAC. It is compatible with many players and analysis software, open license and open source. For small recorders we use X3 as it is much simpler to implement (and uses less CPU ...
- 588
3
votes
How, if at all, are you compressing your recordings?
Here is a paper on Marks method: https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.4776206
Johnson, M., Partan, J., & Hurst, T. (2013). Low complexity lossless compression of underwater sound recordings. ...
3
votes
How, if at all, are you compressing your recordings?
I ended up to use my own compression (obviously).
I was starting with the original X3 compression from Mark Johnsons DTAG toolbox. In the end I simplified it by removing the RICE encoding that only ...
- 7,630
3
votes
How, if at all, are you compressing your recordings?
For us, because we pay for storage space from our host University's research computing department, file storage efficiency is somewhat important to minimize long-run costs. Because of this, our ...
- 1,162
3
votes
Does anyone regularly use FLAC compression for their acoustic data?
Our usual workflow with FLAC is to leave projects that are not being actively analyzed saved in FLAC, which gives us about a 50% file size reduction, while projects that are being actively analyzed ...
- 1,162
3
votes
Accepted
NPL's Good Pratice Guide discourages the use of any compression in recorded data to avoid information degradation - does this make sense?
Agree, the sentence makes no sense and is most likely an oversight by authors and reviewers: "lossless compression" is "lossless" AND "compression", so you cannot ask for ...
- 7,630
3
votes
What Autonomous Recording Units (ARU) allow on-board compression?
The soundtrap models from Ocean Instruments have build in loss-less compression.
Compression is X3 algorithm that is discussed here
- 7,630
2
votes
What Autonomous Recording Units (ARU) allow on-board compression?
For the underwater environment, the WISPR system by Embedded Ocean Systems records directly to FLAC.
WISPR is just the internal board so it’s not really off the shelf available to purchase, but it’s ...
- 3,567
2
votes
What lossy compression is okay for marine sound?
Given how cheap storage has become, and that lossless compression is possible, I really don't see any argument for using lossy compressions: don't go there!
1
vote
What lossy compression is okay for marine sound?
it's not from the marine environment, but this recent paper by Becky Heath et al may be a useful starting point:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.8042
Thanks
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