Bioacoustics software

A variety of free and paid software is available for bioacoustic analyses. Software packages vary from complete graphical interfaces, to command-line interfaces, to utility libraries that can be used to create analysis pipelines in Python, R, or other programming languages.

The inclusion criteria for this list are (1) that the software is targeted to or widely used by bioacoustics researchers, and (2) that the software either is stable, is currently in active development, or was recently released.

This list is not necessarily a recommendation or a guarantee of quality of particular software packages or analysis techniques, but I have indicated in bold which software I've seen used most frequently. I haven't used all of the software below. Some I use frequently and can't live without, whereas some I haven't found to be useful or accurate for my applications.

You should always judge the performance of an analysis method by its performance on your dataset. Analysis methods are often published along with metrics to describe their performance, such as accuracy, precision, and recall. However, different recording conditions or different distributions of sounds present in your dataset can result in starkly different performance of the same method.

If your software meets the criteria above, please contribute to the list! Open an issue on this repository or contact me at tessa.rhinehart at pitt.edu!

Spreadsheet format

The most up-to-date descriptions of software are available in the spreadsheet here.

List format

For a more complete and detailed listing, see the spreadsheet above.

Audiomoth-specific: user-generated tools for AudioMoths

fieldtools (free) - plan deployments copy/format large numbers of SD cards simultaneously
audiomoth-scripts (free) - a variety of spectrogram visualization bash scripts. Also includes script to rename AudioMoth hex files to human-readable filenames.

Data exploration: general-purpose, non-bioacoustics software for listening to/editing recordings and generating spectrograms.

Adobe Audition (paid) - geared toward sound editing
Audacity (free) - simple, lightweight listening and spectrogram viewing, comparison, and manipulation
librosa (free) - Python package with audio loading, spectrogram creation utilities, and per-channel energy normalization
GoldWave (free) - view and manipulate audio
Reaper (free) - spectrogram visualization; enables Python and C/C++ coding within
scipy.signal (free) - Python library including spectrogram creation and cross-correlation functions
SonicVisualizer (free) - spectrogram visualization
Soundata (free) - Python library for loading and working with audio data

Manual organization, review, and annotation: bioacoustics-focused software for organizing and annotating recordings, usually also including features for listening to recordings and generating spectrograms.

Anabat Insight (free and paid versions) - recording organization, annotation, and mapping
ARBIMON (free for certain number of recordings) - web-based interface with annotation functionality
AviaNZ (free) - graphical user interface for organizing and analyzing recordings
BatExplorer (free and paid versions) - organize and annotate bat recordings
BatScope (free) - manage, sort, view, and play databases of recordings, geared toward bats
crowsetta (free) - package for working with and translating between annotation formats
DetEdit (free) - visualize and annotate detections
GlassOFire (free) - Windows software for avian nocturnal flight call review and sorting
INSTINCT (free) - Bioacoustic pipelining software
Ishmael (free) - annotation and real-time recording
Koe Bioacoustics Software (free) - web-based acoustic data management platform geared towards analysis of small acoustic units
Luscinia (free) - database management and recording archiving
Parselmouth (free) - Python library for interacting with Praat annotation functionality
Praat (free) - annotation, especially for individual song analysis (software originally intended for human phonetics)
Raven Lite (free) - listening and spectrogram viewing; tools to manually select and annotate recordings
SDEer (free) - manual annotation for acoustic localization
seewave (free) - R package to display spectrograms
SoundSort (free) - visualize, cluster, and annotate recordings, then export these annotations
Specky (free) - Python app for displaying spectrograms and annotating short sound segments
Tadarida-L (free) - labeling interface of 3-part "Tadarida" software
Triton (free) - condense/annotate very long recordings using Long Term Spectral Averages
Vesper (free, in development) - web-based application for avian nocturnal flight call analysis; also implements BirdVoxDetect, BirdVoxClassify, and others (see below)
warbleR (free) - highly multipurpose R package

Measuring acoustic parameters: acoustic metrics for soundscapes or individual sounds

Acoustic_Indices (free) - Python package for calculating acoustic indices
ARTWARP (free) - MATLAB package to estimate frequency sweeps and cluster-classify tonal sounds
audioset_soundscape_feats_sethi2019 - GitHub repo for using machine learned features for soundscape analyses (see original paper)
Avisoft-SASLab Pro (paid) - "sound parameter measurement" and noise level measurement
hardRain (free) - R software for detecting sounds of rain
Koe Bioacoustics Software (free) - assess song sequence structure
Luscinia (free) - wide variety of acoustic signal analyses
PAMpal (free) - compute acoustic features of PAMguard detections
Parselmouth (free) - Python library for interacting with Praat acoustic parameter measurement functionality
prinia-project (free) - analysis of note complexity, repetition rate, and signal partitioning
Raven Lite (free) - basic measurements of acoustic properties through GUI annotation
Raven Pro (paid) - advanced measurements of acoustic properties
scikit-maad (free) - Python package that can compute ecoacoustic alpha indices
soundecology (free) - calculate soundscape-wide acoustic indices
warbleR (free) - offers variety of measurements acoustic signal structure and timing

Acoustic localization: software for estimation of animal position using recordings from time-synchronized recorders, including functionality for recorder synchronization, time delay of arrival (TDOA) calculation, coordinate position estimation, direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, and improving signal to noise ratio via beamforming

AviSoft SASLab Pro (paid) - finds TDOAs via cross-correlation
CARACAL (free) - sound detection, DOA localization, and sound source separation
HARKBird (free) - source separation and DOA localization
Ishmael (free) - coordinate localization and beamforming
PAMGuard (free)
OpenSoundscape (free) - TDOA calculation and coordinate position estimation
scipy.signal.correlate (free) - Python function for signal cross-correlation (can be used to estimate TDOAs)
SDEer (free) - sound detection, recording synchronization, DOA estimation
Sound Finder (free) - excel and R software for position estimation using pre-calculated TDOAs

Detection: locating potential sounds of interest in recordings. Methods include supervised machine learning, amplitude-based detection, and clustering to group sounds into similar-sounding clusters (e.g. unsupervised machine learning)

Anabat Insight (free and paid versions) - bat call detection and custom filtering in full-spectrum and zero-crossing recordings
ARBIMON (free for certain number of recordings) - web-based interface enabling creation of pattern-matching detectors
AVA (free) - Python package; automated segmentation of syllables
AviaNZ (free) - capable of clustering
Avisoft-SASLab Pro (paid) - automated detection
BatExplorer (free and paid versions) - bat call detection
BatDetect (free) - bat detection in full-spectrum (i.e., not zero-crossing) recordings
bioacoustics (free) - R package for sound filtering, automated detection, and extraction of acoustic features
BirdVoxDetect (free) - machine learning-based detection for nocturnal flight calls
CARACAL (free) - sound detection for acoustic localization
gibbonR (free) - R package with automated detection and segmentation algorithms
Ishmael (free) - automated detection, geared towards marine wildlife
Kaleidoscope (paid, 15-day free trial) - capable of clustering and amplitude-based detection
monitoR (free) - R package for automated detection via template matching
PAMguard (free) - detect vocalizations and clicks; geared toward cetacean monitoring
ohun - automated detection of acoustic signals with tools for diagnosing detector effectiveness
Raven Pro (paid; free or reduced price options) - configurable band-limited energy detection (amplitude-based)
scikit-maad (free) - Python package including clustering functionality
SDEer (free) - several detection algorithms
seewave (free) - compute cross-correlation and signal envelopes
SoundSort (free) - capable of clustering similar pre-detected clips
Tadarida-D (free) - detection and feature extraction for 3-part "Tadarida" software
TweetyNet (free) Neural network for sound event detection, developed to annotate birdsong syllables
warbleR (free)

Classification: predict the identity of sounds captured in recordings, e.g. training a convolutional neural network to identify bird species in a recording

Anabat Insight (free and paid versions) - contains open-source BatClassify classifier and can be used with other algorithms
Animal Sound Identifier (free) - MATLAB software (described here) for classification of animals using training data directly from field recordings, without reference libraries
ANIMAL-SPOT (free) - Python framework for building deep learning classification models
ARBIMON (free for certain number of recordings) - web-based interface for creating template-matching classifiers
ARTWARP (free) - MATLAB package to estimate frequency sweeps and cluster-classify tonal sounds
Avisoft-SASLab Pro (paid) - classification by spectrographic template cross-correlation
AviaNZ (free) - configure your own "filters" for certain species or download pre-configured filters
BatClassify (free) - segmentation and classification of ultrasonic sounds
BatExplorer (free and paid versions) - bat classification
BatScope (free) - classify bat recordings
Banter (free) - create your own hierarchical acoustic classifiers
BirdNET (free) - pre-created neural network classifiers for common birds of North America and Europe
BirdVoxClassify (free) - pre-created nocturnal flight call classifiers for a limited number of North American bird species
gibbonR (free) - R package that enables user to train neural networks, GMMs, and others
hybrid-vocal-classifier (free) - automated labeling geared towards individual syllable identification
Kaleidoscope (paid, 15-day free trial) - pre-created bat classification
Ketos (free) - Python package for acoustic data analysis with neural networks, geared toward underwater acoustics
Koe Bioacoustics Software (free) - clustering with human annotation
Koogu (free) - Python software wrapping around TensorFlow to create flexible deep learning models
OpenSoundscape (free) - software ecosystem for creating and using convolutional neural networks for classification; identifying repeating calls using pulse rate analysis
prinia-project (free) - bird song note classification
scikit-maad (free) - Python library enabling creation of own classifiers using scikit learn
SonoBat (paid) - classification of bat calls
Tadarida-C (free) - discriminant analysis-based classification; part of 3-part "Tadarida" software; includes implementation of classifier for bat sonotypes of the world (described here)
vak (free) - wrapper around Pytorch originally created to benchmark classifiers of individual birdsong syllables

Clustering/dimensionality reduction methods: group sounds into clusters without user-defined categories, or embed acoustic features into a lower-dimensional space for Analysis

AVGN (free) - Python package; latent and generative models of animal vocalizations
AVA (free) - Python package; train generative models of vocalizations

jaytohe / bioacoustics-software Goto Github PK