3 screenshots of the merlin app, recording and identifying bird song.

Since dawn chorus day I’ve been noticing bird song more than ever. This has lead to wondering which birds are singing. A recognise a very small number. I’ve tried a couple of apps and my favourite so far is Merlin.

Merlin identifies bird sounds using breakthroughs in machine learning technology to recognize species based on spectrograms—visual representations of sounds

Sound ID.

Rather delightfully you see the names and thumbnails of bird the app recognises. This are hi-lighted each time the bird is heard. Even better you get the same effect playing back the audio. Hopefully this will lead to me being able to recognise a few more bird songs without the app.

How accurate the app is I do not know, but I have seen most of the ones it has identified nearby.

Screenshots of HikeTracker, map on the left, stats on the right

I’ve been looking for a replacement for Trails .

There are quite a lot of GPX apps out there so it has been interesting looking at them.
Many ‘hiking’ apps are concerned with giving you routes or posting routes you take their own or other services. These apps tend to be quite fully featured and often need an account on an online service. Trying a few out gave me a chance to think of what I wanted.

  1. Easy recording of a trail
  2. Trail shown live on a map, preferably OpenStreeMap.
  3. Quick and simple transfer of gpx track to my mac so that I can use it to tag photos, etc.
  4. Not completely killing the battery of my aging iPhone over a day.

Other features are either a bonus (some stats) or a complication (online services).

I’ve settled, for now at least, on HikeTracker . The app has been designed by a hiker, with the main aim of accuracy & simplicity. It fulfils all of my requirements.

The app is set up to work well “out of the box” for a hiker or walker – just tap “Start” and go!

It has worked well for me in a couple of tests, geotagging some rather blurry photos and giving me a track to add to the map.

I was happy to pay for trails and would be happy to pay for this free app too.

Featured image: Screenshots of HikeTracker, map on the left, stats on the right.