Uploading Templates from External Sources

There are many existing acoustic reference libraries (Xeno-Canto, Macaulay, FishSounds, etc.) and we commonly get users who are interested in using reference calls from these libraries as templates in Arbimon. This article will explain how to upload call clips from external sources to use in Arbimon.

Note: please make sure that you are properly abiding by the licensing associated with the library or specific call you are planning to use!

Step 1: Ensure correct file format

Arbimon is only able to upload .wav or .flac files, so if the call clip you download from an external source is in another format (e.g., mp3), you will need to convert it to WAV. You can do this easily using free programs such as Audacity or FFmpeg, or programmatically through R (seewave, tuneR packages) or Python (librosa, pydub, ffmpeg packages).

Step 2: Ensure acceptable filename format

There are two options here:

The option we usually recommend is to rename the files to format that the uploader will recognize (like that of the Audiomoth, SongMeter, etc.). So for example, Audiomoth uses: prefix_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS, where the prefix is user-defined (so can be anything). We also recommend you choose a date similar to what you already have for the 'real' recordings of the project, so that you don't end up with weird date ranges like recordings in 1980 or something like that.  

Another option is to use the custom filename function in Arbimon to upload the files according to the filenames they already have.

Step 3: Create a new 'hidden' site for templates

We recommend creating a hidden site by checking the 'exclude' checkbox in the Create-Site pop-up. Hidden sites do not need coordinates and will not be included in analyses or insights, so the templates you upload will not alter your results or stats from 'real' sites with recordings.

Step 4: Upload files

You can now proceed with uploading the files to the hidden site you've created in step #3. You can read more about the steps to upload recordings in this help page.

*In the future we hope to add new functionality that will allow you to upload external templates directly into Arbimon to avoid having to rename them or assign them to sites. Stay tuned!