Audio recording length | Voters

Audio recording length

complete

Katherine White

The audio recording should have an option to be longer (or maybe we can apply to make it longer per account). I know the 2 minute limit is likely to save space on the Gorilla servers, but many psycholinguistic experiments need to record for much longer than 2 minutes.

June 29, 2021

Will Webster

marked this post as

complete

We've just released Audio and Video Recording for Task Builder 2 which includes some considerable changes in underlying architecture. This includes changing how we upload recorded files - this should now be more reliable for larger files.

As a result, we've increased the file size limit to 10 minutes for Video and 20 minutes for Audio. We may increase these limits further if response from researchers is positive!

Will Webster

Hi Katherine!  Thank you for your request!
The issue here isn't storage. Instead, the issue is the ability of the participant to upload the audio file in a timely manner, without disrupting the rest of the task.  We don't compress the audio file (and even when converting to MP3 don't carry out any additional compression) to make sure you have the highest quality recording available and no content is lost 'in translation'.  However, this means that even two minutes of audio file can end up being quite large.  Further most internet connection upload speeds are 10-15 times slower than download speeds.  As a result, even uploading one recording can take a significant time and can limit the ability to upload other information (participant metrics, progress data etc.) at the same time.  The more recordings there are and the longer they are, the longer it will take to upload everything, which can result in significant delays at the end of a task (where Gorilla will wait to make sure all your participant data has been uploaded and recorded successfully)  In some cases, this has led to the audio recordings failing to upload and data being lost from the experiment.
There's nothing we can do to control a participants available internet speed and bandwidth, so we can only try to limit how much information needs to be send back, to keep things moving on.
There is an option in the existing Audio Recording zone to have the audio file download to the participants hard disk instead.  This allows for audio recordings of longer than two minutes to be collected.  However, you would then need to arrange your own method for obtaining these files, such as providing participants with a link to a dropbox folder to upload their files to.
We are looking into ways that we could either compress the files safely, or stream them more efficiently, so that we can enable larger files to be collected that will upload reliably.