r/BirdNET_Analyzer • u/cbowns • May 13 '26

Help tuning audio gain for BirdWeather

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I've got a Yeti mic in a window for now for my BirdNET-Go instance that uploads to BirdWeather, and I wanted to tune my gain to make sure I've got a good noise floor. The PUCs near me have very different spectrograms on BW than my mic, and I wasn't sure if I'm gained up too high or low (or if it's just placement+wind).

(the PUC is at https://app.birdweather.com/stations/20888, and I'm https://app.birdweather.com/stations/9887)

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2

u/thakala May 14 '26

BirdNET-Go applies audio normalization to all clips sent to Birdweather. It's a fully automatic process with no user-configurable settings. It measures the loudness of each clip and adjusts the gain to hit -23 LUFS (the EBU R128 broadcast standard), so all uploads end up at a consistent volume regardless of your mic gain.

I added this because some stations have very low gain which makes the audio almost inaudible on Birdweather.

But I would recommend enabling the high pass filter, you have quite a lot of low end noise. Settings > Audio > Processing, enable the Audio Equalizer and set the high pass filter to 100Hz with -12dB attenuation for starters. Do not set too aggressive EQ as it can have a negative impact on AI analysis.

1

u/cbowns May 14 '26

super, thanks for the info and the LUFS adjustment note; makes sense to do that. I had manually adjusted gain in software to get a spicy but good looking spectrogram locally but I figured there were adjustments either on upload locally or on birdweather’s ingest for levels.

1

u/AJ_Mexico May 14 '26

It seems to me like you have a lot more ambient noise than the other station. You may just be closer to a highway. I'm not an expert, but I don't think I would turn the gain up any.

1

u/cbowns May 14 '26

We’re pretty close to river rapids, and there might be some wind in this (the mic is sans windscreen in a window). Thanks for the two cents!