Georeferencing Sound Files Using a GPS Tracklog

[yogazoo]

I'm all set up to conduct biological surveys with equipment to detect bat echolocation. The surveys are conducted while driving road transects. Does anyone know of software that will geotag my time stamped .WAV files using a tracklog from my Garmin (GPX file)? I know that geo-referencing photo's with time stamps is possible from tracklog data but I haven't been able to find anything that will do sound files.

 

Does anyone have first hand experience with this or does anyone know of software to accomplish this task. Thank you.

[+Redwoods Mtn Biker]

Can you even put location tags into a .wav file?

 

This doesn't do what you want, but it may point you towards other resources or open up a new line of thinking (or be totally useless!)...

 

http://www8.garmin.com/products/tourGuideSource/#

 

Basically, it provides a way to reference an MP3 file at a certain location, via a .gpx file. FWIW, I'm not sure if this is supported in the newer Garmin models.

[+dfx]

JPEG tagging happens through the EXIF header. While EXIF theoretically can be put into WAV files, it's an extremely uncommon thing to do, I'd be surprised if there was any software to support that at all. For MP3 files, you'd use the ID3 header. I don't know if ID3 actually provides support for location information, but it's always possible to create your own tags within ID3. An option that's always available is to just rename the file and encode location information into the file names. Just remember that WAV files by default don't contain any metadata, so for georeferencing them you have to use the file modification timestamp, and you need to be careful to preserve that when copying files etc.

[seldom_sn]

You might find something useful here:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Audio_mapping

[yogazoo]

Thanks for all your leads! I'm going to have to do some research. Some digital recording devices have naming conventions that retain the time data in a format like "YYYYMMDDhhmmss.WAV". Alternatively the program could read the "Created On" date associated with that .WAV file. I haven't yet seen a program like this but will update this post if I come across something.

 

The iBats program monitors bat echolocation along a route but the protocals involve timing your entire route while traveling at 15mph. The recording device is set up to record a snapshot every 3.5 seconds and using the number of recordings from the starting time you can place your sound file at a location along the route. This method seems (is) a bit unreliable.

 

iBats Program Synopsis : iBats Program uses GPS to assess roadside habitat use by bats.

Edited January 31, 2012 by yogazoo

[39_Steps]

Thank you for reminding me to take another look at digital wav recorders in the Samson Zoom H-1 class, but I was unaware that even these devices were capable of ultrasonic sound recording of bats. Wind noise, yes, but bats I had not thought of.

 

As to sorting out lat/lon and including coordinates in wav file metadata tags for later searching, good luck. Maybe you could wrap an Adobe pdf around each wav file.

[39_Steps]

Just for kicks I hyperlinked to a Microsoft Windows wav file sound from a Delorme Topo9 Waypoint on the map.

 

Plays just fine.

[Grasscatcher]

Thanks for all your leads! I'm going to have to do some research. Some digital recording devices have naming conventions that retain the time data in a format like "YYYYMMDDhhmmss.WAV". Alternatively the program could read the "Created On" date associated with that .WAV file. I haven't yet seen a program like this but will update this post if I come across something.

 

The iBats program monitors bat echolocation along a route but the protocals involve timing your entire route while traveling at 15mph. The recording device is set up to record a snapshot every 3.5 seconds and using the number of recordings from the starting time you can place your sound file at a location along the route. This method seems (is) a bit unreliable.

 

iBats Program Synopsis : iBats Program uses GPS to assess roadside habitat use by bats.

 

YZ,

Have you contacted Dan Foster (Expert GPS by Topografix)? If EGPS won't already do what you want, I'll bet he can tell point you the right way.

[39_Steps]

Thanks for all your leads! I'm going to have to do some research. Some digital recording devices have naming conventions that retain the time data in a format like "YYYYMMDDhhmmss.WAV". Alternatively the program could read the "Created On" date associated with that .WAV file. I haven't yet seen a program like this but will update this post if I come across something.

 

The iBats program monitors bat echolocation along a route but the protocals involve timing your entire route while traveling at 15mph. The recording device is set up to record a snapshot every 3.5 seconds and using the number of recordings from the starting time you can place your sound file at a location along the route. This method seems (is) a bit unreliable.

 

iBats Program Synopsis : iBats Program uses GPS to assess roadside habitat use by bats.

The concept of saving ultrasonic bat sounds as audio range wav files with the frequency shifted from, perhaps, 50khz to 5khz in 3.5 second sound bites within a long continuous wav file was new to me. It seems that although the gps track logs may contain discrete coordinate point vs. time data along the route, the wav file would be continuous even if "non-linear". Non-linear in this instance would be as that term is used in digital (non-analog tape) video recording/editing.

 

Therefore the time markers might be available in both the wav files and the gps track log files. Even so, matching a cropped sound bite from an occasional bat hot spot in a wav file to the closest gps coordinate point might not be that hard, as it does not seem likely that there can be an infinite number of bats present along most routes.

 

Perhaps a good video camera with an external microphone input could be used for recording the transposed sounds from the external ultrasonic/sonic conversion device. If the camera were set on a bracket to visually record coordinates from the gps display, both location and sound waves could then be observed in a good video editing device. This assumes that reconstituted highly compressed mpeg sound recordings are actually adequate for the purpose. Thanks for bringing this up, as it was a slow day otherwise.