This might seem like a silly question, but I would appreciate help.
If the program is the same (SR, schedule, sleep/record, etc), Will a recording of a quiet morning differ in file size to morning with lots of bird activity (songs, calls, etc)? My guess is that it will not matter since all my files end up being the same size regardless of how active/loud an area is, but I would appreciate any feedback on this in case anyone has different experiences. Additionally, does this also apply to high sample rates with bats? Will a night with no bat activity vs a night with plenty of bat call result in similar file sizes? I’m guessing this will only matter if a trigger function is enabled.
Thank you!
The AudioMoth produces .wav files, which is an uncompressed format. So you are correct that the level of noise and sounds does not change the file size.
If you were using a compressed format like mpeg or mp3, then the file size could start to vary. As an aside: I recently tried a lossless compression algorithm (zip) on 2.48 GB of my night recordings and it only reduced to 1.99 GB, i.e. the compression rate was 0.8: not really worth it.