Fun, but the software could be better – Echo Meter Touch Bat Detector Review

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 iPhone 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???)
Review by lml100 on Echo Meter Touch Bat Detector.