Editing Merlin sound recordings?

[Marty]

Hi, Cobirders,

Last night I had what was likely a young Great Horned Owl in a tree out back, making a repeated call I didn't recall hearing before (not at all screechy or harsh). Of course I couldn't make a visual observation, and Merlin made no suggestions for sound ID.

But I have a long Merlin recording, with especially long spans at the beginning and the end of silence (except for crickets and the clock ticking on the wall beside the window).

Is there any way to edit, or a program you can export a Merlin recording to in order to edit out chunks of silence?? (This recording goes on for over 5 minutes, with a fair amount of it.)

Thanks for any help.

Marty Wolf 

Nw Colorado Springs 

[Richard Trinkner]

You can export the recording, and edit it with Raven on a computer. Raven is  a free software editing program from Cornell. Here’s the link: https://www.ravensoundsoftware.com/software/raven-lite/

It sure would be nice if Merlin allowed for this natively. Exporting a clip would seem to be an easy feature to add. 

Richard 

On Jun 28, 2025, at 1:33 PM, Marty <wolfm...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Jedediah Smith]

Hey Marty,

I personally use Audacity to edit my phone based recording. It takes a bit of messing around to figure everything out, but it is free and does everything I have wanted to do so far, including: clipping and deleting segments, amplifying audio volume, reducing background noise, and showing the spectrogram. I do it on my computer, I am not sure if there is a cell phone based app. I hope that helps!

Cheers,

Jed Smith

[Todd Deininger]

Instructions From ebird 

I also use Audacity

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[Jeff P]

eBird has a helpful article on editing audio files for upload with a few tools referenced.

https://support.ebird.org/en/support/solutions/articles/48001064341-audio-preparation-and-upload-guidelines

Best,

Jeff Percell

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[l p]

I also use Audacity.   deletion of  sections is easy, but watch a quick youTube video.   enhancing volume  is also straightforward.  this is a powerful program, made for music editing;  a few quick steps help the Merlin recordings if you are trying to delete voices and a bird that isn't the focus species. 

Linda P

denver

[Gregg Goodrich]

I use the “Recorder Plus - Audio Editor” app on my iPhone to edit my Merlin recordings. It costs $4.99 per year and runs only on iPhones I believe. You can trim and normalize your Merlin recordings with this app directly on your iPhone. Therefore, when in the field or on a longer birding trip, you no longer need to transfer the recording to a computer. Just work them on the phone and then upload them to your eBird checklist. The app is easy to use and certainly speeds up the process of getting an edited version of your recording on to your checklist. You can also delete sections of a recording, but eBird discourages this in most cases.

Gregg Goodrich

Highlands Ranch

[Chip Dawes]

Audacity is an open source app for Windows, Mac and Linux

You can download it for free at:  https://www.audacityteam.org/download/

With it you can trim down a recording to the snippet containing the interesting parts and save it in a number of formats.

You can also enhance a recording.  There are many options you can explore or simply keep it simple and trim a recording.

I have more experience using it to create ring tones for Android or iPhone from MP3 popular music song recordings, but it will read/write the .WAV format that Merlin uses just as readily as MP3 and several other formats.   Merlin saves your recordings on your phone and you can easily copy them to your computer for editing.

Good luck,

Chip