Sound Onion: Software for marine researchers.

Everything a review needs, in your browser

• See it

  Zoom from a whole recording down to a single call. Drag the top of the decibel scale down to take out the loud sounds. The colours stretch over what is left, so the quiet ones stand out.

• Hear it

  Play the original samples slowed down, or shifted down into hearing the way a bat detector does, filtered to the band on screen.

• Measure it

  Measure a sound's band, pulses and their spacing, and see how closely it matches each animal and device in the catalogue, as a percentage.

• Annotate it

  Draw a box round a sound and say what it is. Each reviewer's answers are saved as plain files next to the audio, earlier answers included.

• Your other data

  We match positions, sensor readings and samples taken at the same time to each recording.

• Filter by level

  As it plays, take out what is louder or quieter than a level you set, frequency by frequency.

• Export

  Save any view as a PNG, and up to ten minutes of any sound as a WAV, exactly as you heard it.

• Any WAV

  8, 16, 24 and 32-bit integer or 32-bit float, at any sample rate.

• Cross-reference

  Join your data sets with each other and with public data sets, each listed with its licence.

• On the map

  Each clip with a position shows as a pin on a map, coloured by its verdict, along the track it was recorded on.

Every recording, where it was made

See each clip on the spot it was recorded, what your reviewers found there, and what is nearby.

• Pins by verdict

  Every clip with a position is a pin, coloured by what its reviewers decided; open one to hear it.

• The tracks

  The route each recording was made along, from the boat's position fixes.

• What's nearby

  Protected areas, wind farms, ports and seamarks, from the data sets chosen for your site, each with its licence.

Underwater sound first

Sound Onion works on any recording. The model it has today listens for underwater sound. If you record something else, talk to us.

Plain files you can script

Recording details, detections, reviews and corrections are all plain, documented files kept next to the audio, each with a format version. Point your scripts at them and analyse all of it. None of it is locked inside Sound Onion.

• Your detector

  If your detector or model writes its results in our documented format, your team reviews them in Sound Onion just as it reviews ours.

• Your data

  Your WAV files stay in your folders under the names you gave them. Sound Onion's files go alongside.

• The analyser, open

  Acoustic Analyzer, our analyser, will be released as open source under the Apache 2.0 licence.

Your recordings, in storage you reach directly

Your recordings live in a storage area you connect to directly over SFTP, SSHFS, SMB or WebDAV. Upload to it, mount it as a drive, and run your scripts over it.

• Lossless

  You hear and measure the original file, never a compressed copy.

• Only what you look at

  Analyse reads only the seconds on screen: five seconds of a 460 MB recording is about 2.5 MB.

• Read in place

  Sound Onion reads your recordings where they are stored and writes its files next to them.

• Behind a login

  Your copy of Sound Onion is served from your storage and reached only through its login.

How it works

During the beta, we set up your storage and your copy of Sound Onion with you, and agree a price.

Once we open, you set it up yourself in four steps, or run it on your own machine.

1. 1 · A login

   Create a login.

2. 2 · A site

   Create your site, at name.sound-onion.com, and add your team to it.

3. 3 · Its compute

   Choose how much computing power it has, and grow or shrink it when you need to.

4. 4 · Its storage

   Choose how much space it has, and grow or shrink it as your recordings do.

Or, once we open, your own machine: run our agent on the computer that holds your recordings, and your site uses that machine's computing power and storage instead. Your recordings are stored on that machine alone and we keep no copy; you decide what is shared and when sharing stops.

Developed in collaboration with

We build Sound Onion with the people who use it, adding what their research needs next.