Full-Spectrum Output Settings

For each Microphone Setting Profile, you can configure whether to save full-spectrum recordings in either the uncompressed WAV format or the compressed W4V format.

On the Setting Profiles tab, enabling Output WAV means that the SMART System will save full-spectrum versions of recorded audio to the internal drive. The SMART System's noise scrubbing and alarm logic run on zero-crossing (ZC) representations of the audio, but full-spectrum recordings provide much more information that can be useful when manually analyzing recordings.

The default WAV Compression setting is None. This means the format used for full-spectrum recordings is WAV, which is an uncompressed format supported by a wide range of audio analysis applications.

W4V Compressed Output

Setting WAV Compression to a W4V setting means files will be saved in the W4V format. W4V is a compression format developed by Wildlife Acoustics specifically for bioacoustics applications. Increasing the degree of W4V compression raises the level of background noise in your recordings, but it does not otherwise alter the content of audio in ways that compression formats designed for music or speech might.
Table 1. W4V File Size Reduction from WAV
W4V Setting Approximate File Size Reduction from WAV
W4V-4 50%
W4V-6 62.5%
W4V-8 75%

To test the different levels of compression, record some example files without compression. Use Kaleidoscope Pro to convert the files to W4V format using different levels of compression, and examine the different versions in the Kaleidoscope Pro viewer. Decide whether the increase in noise level is detrimental before you decide to record directly to a compressed format.