Software and Rentals
Contact Us to Rent ARUs
The following form can be used to inquire about the availability of rental units for your project. This form does not constitute a rental agreement. A/Vian Eco can only rent acoustic recording units to clients located within Canada.
Acoustic Equipment Rental
A/Vian Eco offers a select inventory of Autonomous Recording Units (ARUs) for standalone rental. While we primarily maintain these units for our Hands-On Courses and client bioacoustic surveys, they are also an excellent resource for independent researchers. Rentals are ideal for pilot studies, "try before you buy" scenarios, or temporarily expanding your equipment fleet for larger projects.
We are always happy to brainstorm the best equipment fit for your needs—whether you're looking to rent or buy. Contact us to discuss your project!
Note for International Teams: Shipping rentals outside of Canada often incurs cost-prohibitive customs duties and fees. Because of this, purchasing or renting locally is usually more budget-friendly. If you would like expert advice on what equipment to purchase for your region, we are here to help.
Devices in Our Inventory
Sound Optimization for Fading Talkative Signals and Preserving Other Key Environment Noises
A tool for human privacy protection for open-source environmental acoustic datasets.
SOFTSPOKEN is an open-source, free-to-use tool designed to help researchers find and silence human voices in outdoor ecological acoustic datasets. By leveraging a machine learned model, SOFTSPOKEN detects probable human speech sounds while ignoring critical environmental and animal sounds. Users are encouraged review and choose to either silence these detections or export observations as a dataset.
The tool is designed to support:
- sharing audio recordings while ethically preserving human privacy.
- excluding recordings from analysis that could be affected by human presence.
- comparing human activity to animal acoustic behaviour.
- more… tell us about your project!
Human Privacy and Open Data - Win-win!
With SOFTSPOKEN, researchers can confidently contribute to open datasets without compromising privacy, ensuring ethical and responsible data sharing.
Download the SOFTSPOKEN desktop app and see additional information here:
Key Features:
- Automated Speech Detection – Uses a trained model to identify human voices while ignoring non-human environmental sounds.
- No-Code Interface – Intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) allows easy review and selective removal of detected speech segments.
- Review and Assess – The user interface allows you to review probable human detections by the model. The user can then assess whether to keep or silence the model’s detections.
- Minimal Data Loss -Ensures that only necessary time intervals with human speech are silenced, preserving the integrity of ecological recordings for open-sourced sharing.
- Open-Source & Free – Free desktop app available for researchers and practitioners to foster collaboration and innovation in ecoacoustics. If you appreciate python code like we do, our programmer has also generously shared his work under a permissive MIT license.
This useful privacy and open data tool was created in collaboration with our amazing software development partner: Jarrett Lubky.
We spend a lot of time over here managing large audio/visual datasets for environmental research and consultation. We teach strategies for assessing the quality of remotely captured sensor data.
Our GitHub is a place where we store R-scripts you might find handy for:
- Managing and tracking large audio datasets.
- Manipulating raw outputs from audio analysis programs to optimize data available for secondary analysis (e.g., R, excel, etc.)
- Softspoken
- Audacity Macros for batch manipulating .wav files.
All of these scripts are permissively licensed for you to download, use, modify to your preference, even for commercial purposes. The data manipulation R-scripts contain explanatory comments to help walk through their use and outputs.
Stay tuned, more useful scripts to come in future updates.
Data Management Scripts and Tools
github.com/AVianEco
