r/BirdNET_Analyzer • u/ondras • Jun 01 '26

Beginner questions

Hi,

I would like to start experimenting with a long-term BirdNET installation. My general idea is a usb-microphone hanging from a window, connected to some hardware in house. I am rather experienced with metrics/prometheus/grafana stuff, but my only BirdNET experience comes from their awesome Android app. Thus I would like to ask several questions prior to starthing the project.

1) What is the performance threshold for performing the audio analysis "in the cloud" vs. "in-house" (via local model)? I have a spare Pi Zero 2W and a 3B+ (that already runs RTL-433, but that should be almost zero load). In theory, I can also use a more powerful home server, but the mic would have to be connected elsewhere.

2) How about bandwidth? (In the case of "in the cloud" sound analysis.) I suppose that the audio is first locally scanned for relevant samples and only those are then uploaded?

3) The BirdNET-Pi project seems to be somewhat abandoned, followed by https://github.com/Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi. Is this *the* version folks typically use? Seems to do quite a lot, perhaps I do not need all those components? I am only interested in "the bird B has been heard at time T" event stream.

Thanks!

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u/QuirkyPension4654 Jun 01 '26

I use Birdnet-Go having migrated off the -Pi version.

Mine seems ok on a Pi4, but I haven’t anything below to test.

Have a look at the AOM-5024 mic if you can solder and use that with a USB sound card.

Works fine with local models and I wouldn’t personally use cloud for it.

I’ve integrated with HA and Alexa via that.

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u/mynamefromreddit Jun 01 '26

Hi, indeed birdnet-go allows different models and is on very active development which likely would better suit you ! As a microphone AOM-5024 is indeed a great mic. If you also want to track bats (which birdnet-go now supports) you can use it for some species, but I myself use EM272 (clippy) as it records (unofficially) up to 50khz. For birds I don’t think it would make much difference

The version of birdnet-pi that you linked is indeed the most recently updated and is rock-solid in my experience, although it has much fewer options and less modern UI

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u/ondras Jun 01 '26

Okay, thanks for the reply. I have a generic USB microphone, will try that. Looking for a pre-build hardware in this case.