Echo Meter Touch Bat Detector for Android

We bought the echo-meter 2 ultrasonic mike and downloaded this app. It’s been a lot of fun listening to the bats, but a bit frustrating in a number of ways. So a 4-star review, but they should fix the code. 1. This isn’t their fault, but on an Android you can’t use anything audio at the same time as the app so e.g. no headphones of Bluetooth speakers. This would be OK, except that: 2. The echo-meter appears to pick up output from the speaker (why isn’t it either cancelled in software, or given a setting to block everything below e.g. 15 kHz?). The result is low-frequency “echoes” of the bat signals. At least, I think that that’s what’s going on. 3. There’s no way to get the app to show you what it thinks that the species sonograms are. The code apparently uses a clustering algorithm, so it could display the characteristic patterns that it’s looking for. Why would you do that on the app not a computer you might ask: 4. While you can download your recordings, the free version of your application that they recommend (kaleidoscope) is less capable than the iOS app and has no ability to ID bats. For a $170 piece of kit that’s really annoying. I can see why they don’t give a full pro license, but a version that’s as good as the app would be reasonable and appreciated. Oh, and Kaleidoscope can’t display the GPS info either (I could probably do that myself as the metadata is transferred), and it sorts incorrectly. And doesn’t read all the fields in the csv files (maybe the pro version does???)

Been using this for ages with my echometer touch. From way back when the app cost 200 dollars. The latest version no longer works on any of my devices. It just continuously stutters. Support has given no help even though my hardware is listed as being supported. The only response from support I received was to never update my Mobile or iPod touch. Very disappointed.

App looks promising but you can’t even try it out without buying their $200 microphone. I wish they would add a feature to use the built in Android microphone instead. It obviously doesn’t have the same frequency range but would allow someone to play around with it before making a large investment.

As someone who enjoys bat-watching, I’m very happy that there is a fairly affordable bat-detector with an auto-ID feature. I just wish there were more phyllostomid representation in the auto-ID.

The last few weeks I have had hours of background recordings with very few bat signatures. Last night had basically 1 hour and 45 minutes of continuous background recordings with only two identified bat calls. The only reason quit recording is because device ran out of memory. Can I uninstall the recent updates?