Diary, locations, and playback
Fieldwork Recorder gives every recording a place in a dated diary. You can browse by time, search the written record, follow a tag, listen again, and inspect where the entry was made.
The diary and search
The Diary tab is a calendar-based view of your field record. Select a day to see the entries made on it. This makes it easy to reconstruct a session, a trip, or a specific workday without relying on file names.
Calendar navigation
Browse by date and see entries grouped on the day they belong to. Edit the entry date when a recording is logged later than the event itself.
Text search
Search across entry titles, notes, and tags. A useful search term can be a place, a project code, a species, or a phrase from your notes.
Tag filters
Tap a tag to see every entry that uses it. The Diary also shows commonly used tags for the selected day and a tag-frequency view for the whole journal; tapping a chip applies it as a filter.
Entry detail
Open an entry to review its audio, note, attachments, GPS data, file details, and timestamps in one place.
Tags work best when they are deliberately repeated. For example, a project might use one tag for the site, one for the activity, and one for a recurring subject. That makes search precise without forcing a rigid folder system.
Locations and routes
GPS is chosen at the beginning of a recording. Location can be disabled entirely, which is appropriate for private or indoor work. When enabled, Fieldwork Recorder uses one of two modes:
| GPS mode | What it saves | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Start/End | A coordinate at the start and another at the end of recording. | A concise record of where the observation began and ended, with little overhead. |
| Track | A series of points collected while recording. | A route or movement trace for walks, inspections, surveys, and travel. |
| Off | No recording GPS is collected. | Location-sensitive work or entries where place is not relevant. Imported photos may still have their own GPS. |
When an entry has location data, its detail view can show a map with start and end markers or the collected route. GPS accuracy varies with the device and surroundings; treat it as field context rather than survey-grade measurement.
Fieldwork Recorder filters obviously invalid or implausible fixes and reduces clusters of stationary GPS jitter before drawing a route. That makes the displayed path more useful, but it cannot replace a survey-grade GPS receiver or guarantee a complete track in difficult conditions.
When Recording GPS storage is set to Embed in audio, accepted points can also live in the recording file, linked to the audio playback timeline. See how location travels with audio.
Choose Export GPS from a recording to create a route file. Fieldwork Recorder supports GPX, KML, and GeoJSON, which are widely useful for mapping software, GIS workflows, and long-term storage.
Map playback and mapped attachments
When an entry has a GPS Track, its map can follow playback through the route. Use View Full Screen Map when you want the map to occupy the screen; the full-screen view includes play, pause, stop, a seek bar, and playback speed. Seeking in the audio also moves the current-position marker.
Photos and drawings added during an active Track recording can appear as markers at their approximate moments and locations. A marker highlights as playback reaches that moment, and tapping it opens the attachment full screen. A selected photo with usable location data of its own may also appear on the map even when it was not captured along the recording route. Drawings or photos without a usable position remain attached to the entry without a map marker.
Playback and audio tools
The Player tab lists recordings by date. Select an entry to play, pause, seek through the audio, or adjust the speed from 0.25x through 2x. Faster listening is useful for review; slower listening can help with dense speech or unfamiliar sound. Very large local M4A recordings use a memory-conscious playback path so they remain practical to review on supported Android devices.
You can rename a recording file from the Player and export an individual entry. An entry export packages the recording with its accompanying journal metadata and attachments, making it easier to share or archive one documented observation.
For M4A recordings, the audio editor can trim the beginning or end, remove a selected interval, extract a selected interval, or split audio at a chosen point. Choose whether to replace the original or save a copy. Edits require a selection of at least one second; a canceled or failed edit leaves the original unchanged.
Editing and deleting entries
You can return to a saved diary entry to update its title, date, tags, Markdown note, and attachments. The original recording timestamps and collected GPS context remain part of the entry detail.