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

When I started building FieldLog one of the earliest design decisions was awkwardly simple: what word should I use to describe each captured sound file?

In the world of audio, two terms compete for this role: take and recording. Both have long histories, and both are technically correct. But I went with take.

The Split Between “Take” and “Recording”

In audio culture, these words come from different lineages:

• Recording grew out of archival, ethnographic, and broadcast traditions. It simply means captured sound, whether a dawn chorus, a radio interview, or dictation.

Field recording is as much about capturing the context as it is about capturing the sound. When you’re deep in a session—whether you’re documenting urban soundscapes, recording foley in the wild, or capturing that perfect bird call at dawn—the metadata you log can make the difference between a usable library and a digital graveyard of unnamed files.

Field Log offers three powerful ways to annotate your recordings: UCS tags, free tags, and notes. Each serves a different purpose, and understanding when and how to use them will transform how you organize, search, and recall your field recordings.… Keep reading

Thank you for stumbling on this little corner of the internet. My name is Houstin, and I’ll be your guide into this site and all its accompaniments. Let’s start with an FAQ, shall we?

What is FieldLog?

FieldLog is an app (currently online and Android) that allows users to log metadata from Field Recording activities. It allows users to track their gear (recorders, microphones, and kits which are various combinations of the two.) More importantly though, it allows for the logging of takes or the recordings themselves.… Keep reading