Thursday 23 July 2015

Quiet times!

Here we are in the quiet time! Birds fall quiet in mid-Summer - singing uses energy and also attracts predators, so it isn’t sensible to sing unless you have to. Once the breeding season is over, there is no longer a need to sing to attract a mate and protect territory, and on top of that, summer is the time to moult into fresh, new feathers so during this time the bird is slightly less nimble and less able to escape from predators. It’s best to keep quiet!

As developers of bird song apps, we are very aware of the quiet months. It’s a quiet time for us too!

Earlier this year we released our Chirpomatic app for Shazam®-style automatic birdsong identification. We released it in time for the peak birdsong season and we’ve been delighted with the number of recordings that we have been sent, both by email and uploaded to our website. We listen to every recording we are sent, and reply to as many as we can but sometimes we’ve been overun, so thank you to every single one of you who has sent a recording! 

We’ve also been looking into the reasons why the app sometimes fails to identify the bird, with some interesting results! More on that soon…

If you would like to find out more about Chirpomatic, tap here for the App Store.


The splendid photo of a moulting robin is by vil.sandi
Shazam® is the registered trademark of Shazam Entertainment Limited and is not affiliated with iSpiny in any way.

Tuesday 14 July 2015

Chirpomatic update

The first update is out for Chirpomatic, our Shazam®-style app for birdsong! The biggest change is that the recording time has been increased to 12 seconds - this will help to catch a few more chirps of each song, or the repeated phrase of a song, and will give the app more to analyse. We are approaching the time of the year when birds fall silent while they moult, so the extra recording time will be particularly useful.

We'd like to say a very big Thank You to everyone who has sent us a recording, whether by email or uploading. Your recordings will be used to improve the bird song recognition, and also give us an insight on the use of the app and where things might go wrong. They are incredibly helpful - please continue to send them!

Updates to Zwitschomat and Kvitteromat are still with Apple but should be released very soon.

Shazam® is the registered trademark of Shazam Entertainment Limited and is not affiliated with iSpiny in any way.