luckily ive been able to keep my job and work from home during the beer flu panic. Like everyone else ive been bored out of my mind in the evenings and I cant go anywhere because nazi stay at home orders.

So I started listening to alot more podcasts. I found the Cliff and Bobo bigfeets podcast. They had a 2 part episode with some lady, I think her name was Bea Mills?
Anyway both episodes were 90% related to audio recordings, they talked about some of the recorders and I found out they were pretty much off the shelf recorders and not some thousand dollar audio equipment.

so I was like... i'm in.


Off to amazon I go and got a recorder. The one I got was actually pretty sweet, can record some impressive bitrate audio and has the ability to adjust the sensitivity of the internal/external mic's. Already had a 16gb micro SD card. I'm in business.

I also happened to have some high end microphone elements.
I took an old speaker cable and soldered on the microphone element and built a waterproof housing for the recorder and a boom for the mic out of some pvc and camo'd it up.

I tested it out on the deck and the audio recording of the birds chirping in the distance is actually louder on the recording than I could naturally hear, which surprised me.

so behold my creation









Am I gonna hear bigfeets talking about what to have for dinner? probably not. But I do recall deer hunting with my dad when i was little and being in the woods at 4am and hearing whats referred to as tree knocks.

At the very least maybe i'll pick up some coyote's howling, or the mountain lion that screamed at me one night - which ive been told couldnt happen since they dont exist in my state



anyway ive got 400 acre's of mountain property to put it out on and it was a fun $60 project

TL:DR

Stop building IEDs

My sony recorder is super sensitive.
Sucks at times...but picks up everything..

Neat!

That's pretty cool. How long will it record?

I put a 16gb card in it, built in memory is 4gb and advertises 40 hours.

I upped to the highest quality, so with the bigger card I should get around 100 hours of audio.



I set it out this past weekend and went through the recording last night, got something walking in the leave's, some owls hooting back and forth. Then a thunderstorm.

I was impressed with the quality of the audio though.

Link to recorder?

Do you really have to listen to 100hrs of audio? Or can you use a program to analyze the recording?

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-px-series-digital-voice-recorder/5774900.p?skuId=5774900




I import the audio files (MP3) into a program called Audacity (its free).

I remembered the program because i used it several years ago to cut snips of audio and make custom ringtones for flip phones back in the day when it was popular.

The recorder splits the audio files into 12 hour segments so you import each one and it displays the audio on a waterfall graph. then you can skip around and play the audio where you see noise spikes.
Took me about an hour to listen to all the stuff from a night of recording.

Thanks for the info, I’m going to get a setup like this.

I used my iPhone recorder around an old cemetery,
Some graves date back well before the revolutionary war......... I got some
Shocking surprises when I Listened later. It doesn’t take anything fancy.

What about listening to it playing backwards?

I ran some of the sounds through the computer and it came back with "magma displacement".