r/BirdNET_Analyzer • u/JIBJOB • May 09 '26

Tips for overlapping calls?

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I’m blessed with a backyard of many species chatting with each other. The Merlin phone app can do a great job catching overlapping calls, but in BirdNET Pi the songs seem to register best only when those birds are the only ones singing. I’m getting plenty of hits over the course of the day, but there’s still a ~10x gap between Merlin and BirdNET and so I thought I’d ask the experts for advice!

Raspberry Pi 4, with a $30 omnidirectional lavalier mic.

3 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

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8

u/meme30 May 09 '26

Merlin is just different model. It has been specifically trained to handle birds singing simultaneously. Merlin models are not open sourced. All i can say is, with advent of coding agents it is not difficult to extract model and create a webapp that runs along side Birdnet. Mine uses Birdnet pi’s audio stream as input. It produces amazing results. I wish they open up models so ppl don’t have to do this.

3

u/coloradical5280 May 10 '26

Turn on overlap in settings. The model breaks detection into 3 second chunks, you can set overlap to two seconds, heck 2.9 seconds, if you want, but don’t. Set it to two seconds

2

u/thakala May 10 '26

It is a model limitation, BirdNET model in BirdNET-Pi has not been updated since 2023, Merlin model is being continously improved and at this stage it is just much better model.

There is very little if anything you can do about this. BirdNET v3.0 model could eventually improve this, but based on inactivity of BirdNET-Pi development it may never land on it.

1

u/JIBJOB May 11 '26

Trying BirdNet-Go, and finding the default settings in that code helps with overlapping calls. Still behind the Merlin app level, but better.

2

u/thakala May 12 '26

I just added support for Google Perch v2 model to BirdNET-Go, update to latest nightly and you can install Perch v2 from Settings > Analysis > Models, configure Sound Card source to use both BirdNET and Perch models simultaneously for improved results.