Skip to contents

Download Sound Recordings from Atlas of Living Australia (ALA)

Source: R/get_ala_sound.R
get_ala_sounds.Rd

Queries the ALA for sound recordings of a specified taxon and downloads them. This function improves upon basic media downloads by handling metadata and limiting download counts.

Usage

get_ala_sounds(
  taxon_name,
  target_n = 50,
  download = TRUE,
  out_dir = "sounds",
  include_taxon_name = TRUE,
  supplier = c("all", "CSIRO"),
  as_wav = TRUE
)

Arguments

taxon_name

Character. Scientific or common name of the taxon to search for.

target_n

Numeric. Target number of sound files to download. Default is 50.

download

Logical. If TRUE, downloads audio files. If FALSE, only returns the count of available recordings. Default is TRUE.

out_dir

Character. Output directory for downloaded files. Will create subdirectories "audio" and "metadata_ala.csv". Default is "sounds".

include_taxon_name

Logical. If TRUE, prepends the taxon name to the filename. Default is TRUE.

supplier

Deprecated. ANWC/CSIRO recordings are not indexed under multimedia == "Sound" in ALA and cannot be retrieved via this function. Use get_anwc_sounds() instead.

as_wav

Logical. If TRUE, converts downloaded audio files to 48 kHz 16-bit PCM WAV (required for BirdNET and other bioacoustic pipelines). Default is TRUE.

Value

Character. The absolute path to the metadata CSV file created/updated, or 0 if no recordings were found/downloaded.

Details

ALA sound records are retrieved via atlas_media() with a multimedia == "Sound" filter. Because some ALA records tagged as "Sound" contain non-audio media (e.g. image/jpeg), a secondary mimetype check keeps only records with audio/* MIME types.

The download URL for ALA sounds is the image_url field (ALA uses this field for all media types). File extensions are derived from the mimetype field, not from the URL (ALA URLs have no extension).

A known galah 2.x bug causes a recycling error when fetching many sound records in a single request. The function automatically falls back to year-by-year fetching (most recent years first) to work around this.

See also

Other ala: get_ala_circle_occurrences(), get_anwc_sounds()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
galah_config(email = "your-email@example.com")
# Search and download up to 10 sounds as WAV
get_ala_sounds("Ninox boobook", target_n = 10, as_wav = TRUE)
} # }