Chirps Recorder

Portable bioacoustics for iPhone and iPad: live spectrograms, WAV recording, heterodyne monitoring, data review, and high-quality export.

Chirps is a bioacoustics field companion for iPhone and iPad. It helps researchers, species surveyors, recordists, students, and naturalists visualise, monitor, record, and review sound in the field without needing a laptop.

Use Chirps for live spectrogram and waveform visualisation, external USB microphones and audio interfaces, passthrough and heterodyne monitoring, uncompressed WAV recording, and high-quality spectrogram export for reports.

Key features:

• Real-time GPU-accelerated spectrogram and waveform display
• Support for built-in microphones, USB microphones, and audio interfaces supported by iOS
• Automatic audio route discovery and device capability reporting
• WAV recording with adjustable ring buffer, pre-trigger, and post-trigger capture durations
• Live passthrough monitoring
• Heterodyne monitoring with tunable centre frequency
• Data review interface for recorded files
• Session notes that can be edited from within the app
• High-detail spectrogram review with adjustable window width
• Two-finger scrolling for waveform and spectrogram inspection in review mode
• PNG spectrogram export with scientific axes, grid lines, colour legend.
• File sharing through the iOS share sheet
• Local diagnostic log for troubleshooting hardware and audio route issues

Chirps is designed for field use. Recordings are saved as WAV files in the app’s local storage and can be accessed through the Files app. If iCloud Drive is enabled, iOS can sync those files to your other Apple devices using Apple’s standard system services.

This Version:

Initial App Store release of Chirps for iPhone and iPad.

Includes live spectrogram and waveform visualisation, WAV recording, passthrough and heterodyne monitoring, external audio device support, data review, session notes, spectrogram export, and on-device diagnostics.