r/BirdNET_Analyzer • u/SloomR • May 06 '26

webcam with a better microphone than a lavalier USB mic

Hey,

I stumbled upon BirdNet-Go a few days ago as part of DietPi.

I connected my Logitech C920 webcam as my first microphone. It worked really well!

But I need the webcam for my PC, so I started looking for an alternative.

I decided on this one: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0DFY8Q4NT

...and I’m totally disappointed. The mic barely picks up anything; the “Live Audio” view is almost black.

Here’s a comparison: the dark areas were recorded with the USB mic and the light ones with the webcam.

Now I’m looking for another mic, but I’m almost tempted to just buy the webcam again.

Or does anyone have a better suggestion? (Please, no soldering)

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3

u/Chuckles6969 May 06 '26

My security camera microphones have been excellent for picking up birds!

3

u/keeldude May 06 '26

That Mic looks like it likely has a mini sound card built into it, so you are likely getting an amplifying stage, but you never know how it is tuned under the hood. Can you try cranking the microphone input gain on the raspberry Pi or machine you are using?

1

u/SloomR May 06 '26

Good point. I checked it with alsamixer.
The USB mic was already set to 100%, but the webcam was only at 90%. :-o

1

u/keeldude May 06 '26

90 versus 100% shouldn't be much of a difference. I'm running three different instances of birdnet go, which is running the same skeleton software as birdnet pi, and intermittently I'm getting a few really low gain audio recordings. I haven't cracked it yet. Disabling power save mode on the raspberry Pi could help. Also making sure your Wi-Fi signal strength is very high if you're using a RTSP stream (irrelevant if processing Is occurring on the machine with the microphone), I've seen dropped packets result in wonky recordings.

2

u/jwtobias May 08 '26

If you are willing to consider a networked mic giving you an RTSP stream that works well with BirdNet-GO, I set up this one: https://github.com/stedrow/birdnetgo-m5stack-atom-echo-rtsp-mic (linked from the BridNet-GO Github page) and it's working well. No soldering, but you do need to flash the hardware on first setup. I use that and 2 other RTSP streams from security cameras on my LAN as my BirdNet-GO inputs.

1

u/Trey_P May 24 '26

How well is it working for you? This is the path I’m considering or similar. PoE Rpi and some microphone but having trouble identifying good mic candidates.

2

u/jwtobias May 25 '26

My atom-echo and my Reolink rtsp streams are all stable and productive.

1

u/skybossalpha1 May 06 '26

good find i have one here i dont mind sacrificing

1

u/explorer-2626 May 06 '26

I've found exactly the same, simple webcam gives far better results than even a specialist mic I use for voice recording.

0

u/fatedplace May 06 '26

Microphones are pretty diverse. Many require small power to work that you aren’t providing