Audio Recorder for Nocturnal Flight Calls

This is part of the LycoBirds Guide to Recording Nocturnal Flight Calls by David Brown

I use the Sony PCM-M10 audio recorder. Unfortunately this model is longer manufactured. It is a great audio recorder for birding.

The PCM-M10 has no mono mode, so with my setup it records as the left channel of stereo and I convert it to mono on my computer using Audacity (as explained in the next section).

The audio inputs of the PCM-M10 are standard 3.5mm audio jacks. It has a microphone input and a line level input. I found that I got the best recording level by using the microphone input and setting the record level at about 3.5 out of 10.

I record as a 22kHz, 16 bit wav file.

The max file size (2.15GB) is reached in 6 hours 45 minutes. A new file is automatically started once this limit is reached.

I plug speakers or headphones into the headphone jack of the recorder to listen live.