New Personal Project – FieldLog the field recording metadata logger

I’ve had a very busy spring, 4 business trips in 2 months with one of them being overseas for two weeks. Over the years I’ve gotten a lot better about carrying my camera along as well as my audio recorders. Cameras are great with how easily you can figure out where things were from (especially the GFX with GPS sync to my phone.) Audio recordings, well, not so much. I have about 20 gigabytes of recordings that about a 1/3 of them I just don’t remember where or what I was doing when I took them. This is especially sad for some of them in and around London and Yorkshire, and I’m not likely to get back to them anytime soon…

Anyway, this inspired me to write a little android app to help automate some of this logging. My goal was high speed, low drag. So even if I’m in a hurry or trying to do something stealth-fully, it lets me snap a quick picture, it will automatically fill out timestamp, weather, and a few other things so I can get on with it. (There are plenty of other fields too if I’m feeling ambitious or want to add more while sitting on a train.)

I added some screenshots of this to a reddit post and it garner enough attention that I posted the whole app on the Google Play store.

So, introducing FieldLog!

Not surprisingly, a lot of people (especially creative professionals) don’t use Android. I am not prepared (at the moment) to write an iOS app, so I decided to take some of my knowledge using Flask, and wrote a web app version too.

Introducing FieldLog.net!

Both apps are still in early release, but I consider them fairly stable, and fairly feature comparable.

The app refers to recordings as takes. Both because this is how Zoom and the other recorders name their files, and for something that has to programmatically be repeated all the time, 4 characters is a lot nicer!

Organize microphones, recorders, and group them together for form kits!

Integrated OpenStreetMap allows you to see all your recording locations on a map.

So there’s the quick tour. I’m pretty proud of this, now I just need my own fun trip to take it on and test it all out! The blog (and social media links on it) has a lot more information and place for discussion. If you try it out please let me know!