Blog Updates

Field Recording, Ambience, and Soundscape: What Do Words Actually Mean?

January 27, 2026 By houstin 0 Comments

The vocabulary around environmental audio can be surprisingly broad. I’ve briefly discussed the take/recording dilemma before, and today I’d like to touch on field recording, ambience, and soundscape. These terms are often used interchangeably in casual conversation (well, mostly reddit and youtube, normal people don’t really use them at all,) yet each carries a distinct history, lineage, and theoretical set of expectations.

Field Recording

Field recording is the simplest of the three terms, because it describes a practice: going out into the world and capturing sound with a microphone and a recorder.… Keep reading

Android FieldLog v1.5.2 – Take Creation Speedups

January 20, 2026 By houstin 0 Comments

Release Date: January 19, 2025
Version: 1.5.3

Take Creation Memory/Speed Ups

It was always the intention to make the number of tracks/sample rate/bit depth save between takes, so the last used one would be the default when creating a new take. This broke somewhere along the line, but I have it fixed now.

There have been a number of dependency and gradle components updated as well.

As always, please reach out if you have feature requests or find bugs!… Keep reading

Android FieldLog v1.5.1 – Map Improvements

December 22, 2025 By houstin 0 Comments

Release Date: December 22, 2025
Version: 1.5.1

Enhanced Map Experience

The maps have been a bit subpar, since I’ve mostly been using them on the web app. So here are a bunch of changes for the android version….

  • Maps now use the entire screen in landscape orientation, providing significantly more viewable area.
  • The map preserves your position and zoom level when rotating the device, and all controls adapt automatically to your screen size (buttons resize from 40-48dp, padding adjusts from 8-24dp).
… Keep reading

Fulfilling the original intention: FieldLog goes abroad!

December 9, 2025 By houstin 0 Comments

I started writing FieldLog after frustrations from how poorly I handled organization after a trip to England in April. Well, I’ve been using the Android app (and syncing online) since around the start of September, and I took it on a recent trip to Japan for two weeks in November. I generated about 600GB of /stuff/ a mix of video, audio, and photos.

Particularly when it comes to audio I generated 21 ambiances, and another dozen plus longer form takes.

As I get through processing things, I’ll upload them to my YouTube channel you can find at https://www.youtube.com/@houstinwehaveaproblem… Keep reading

FieldLog Android Update – Version 1.5.0

December 3, 2025 By houstin 0 Comments

Smoother, Faster: Text Input Fixes and Under-the-Hood Improvements

Version 1.5.0 might not look different on the surface, but it feels dramatically better. I fixed the text input lag that made typing feel sluggish, and updated a ton of dependencies. It’s amazing how much the mobile ecosystem moves on even in a few months.

A lot of these problems I found while using the app out in the field on a Japan trip. So it was a lot of small problems that didn’t come up sitting at my desk.… Keep reading

Why Field Recording Is as Much About Memory as It Is About Sound

September 18, 2025 By houstin 0 Comments

This one isn’t really technical, and probably better described as rambling, so buyer be warned…

In 2016, as part of a work project, I traveled to China to demonstrate some technology I had developed. The project was a lot of fun for a younger engineer in his 20s, it allowed me to see a lot of different places while following the trade show booth. The China trip though, was my first visit to Asia, and became the first real trip I took a nice camera along on.… Keep reading

FieldLog Updates – September 13th, 2025

September 15, 2025 By houstin 0 Comments

Greetings all!

Here are the things I worked on this week with FieldLog. Feature sets are getting there, but still in very much a testing phase. Bug reports and additional feature requests are still very much appreciated.

Android

  • No release this week

Web App

  • Added reordering to Kits
  • Fixed reordering of recorders and mics
  • Refactored CSS of gear to reuse code from takes
  • Added some extra basic user analytics, to track how much you’ve been recording lately
  • Added Persistent Web App functionality!
… Keep reading

FieldLog Web Goes Mobile: Using FieldLog offline without the app

September 15, 2025 By houstin 0 Comments

I am excited to announce that FieldLog now supports Progressive Web App (PWA) technology, bringing you a mobile app experience without needing to download anything from the App Store. While not a complete replacement for a native app, it gives you the most important features to you regardless of connection status!

This new feature is hot off the presses, so please reach out if you are having any issues!

What is a Progressive Web App (PWA)?

A Progressive Web App is a web application that uses modern web technologies to deliver an app-like experience directly through your browser.… Keep reading

FieldLog Updates – September 6th, 2025

September 6, 2025 By houstin 0 Comments

Greetings all!

Here are the things I worked on this week with FieldLog. Feature sets are getting there, but still in very much a testing phase. Bug reports and additional feature requests are still very much appreciated. This week included the soft launch of the app, with posts on the reddit.com/r/fieldrecording self-promo thread and on airwiggles. Need to find some new ways to get the app out there more.

Android

  • Released version 1.4.6
    • Added ability to pick a photo instead of just take a new one for gear (mics, recorders, kits)
    • Added gear image syncing
    • Various refactors and clean ups
New gear photo prompt iconography when there’s an existing photo.
… Keep reading

How to Organize and Tag Field Recordings

September 4, 2025 By houstin 0 Comments

If you’ve spent any time field recording, you probably have had similar pain to me: Folders full of ZOOM0001.wav and TASCAM_2025-09-01.wav, with no clue what’s actually inside those files without clicking and listening. Months later, that recording of “birds at dawn” might as well be “busy airport.”

I got frustrated with this exact problem — so much so that I ended up writing FieldLog. I was kind of jealous of my Fuji camera’s GPS tagged photos with their full EXIF data.… Keep reading