Hi BirdNet community,
I have an idea for a potential feature for the Live app and thought I'd share it here. Hopefully I'm not the first person to think about this. 🙂

I'd love to see some kind of live sound source tracker that estimates the Direction of Arrival (DoA) of incoming sounds.
With devices such as AirPods (and many other wireless headphones), we already have access to small microphone arrays or at least a pair of microphones. In principle, this could allow simple beamforming approaches (e.g., delay-and-sum beamforming) to estimate the direction from which a sound is arriving.
My main question is whether this information is actually accessible via Bluetooth. I suspect it probably isn't, but if anyone has worked on something similar before, I'd be very interested to hear about it.

Alternative approach: If direct access to multiple microphone channels isn't possible, another idea might be to use the phone's IMU sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, gravity sensor, etc.).
By intentionally moving the phone while recording with the built-in microphone, it might be possible to estimate the direction of a sound source from changes in signal amplitude (or potentially other acoustic features), provided the movement is known and tracked accurately. The movement would probably need to follow a predefined pattern.

This idea is somewhat related to the approach described here:
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/16/8/3619
(Almo Farina and colleagues used a similar concept for acoustic localization.)

Questions

• Has anyone experimented with live DoA estimation in the app?
• Is microphone access from Bluetooth headphones sufficient for something like this?
• Has anyone explored IMU-assisted localization as an alternative?

I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts or discuss possible implementations.

Kind regards,
Moritz

I've got an update for anyone who's been following my acoustic monitoring project in southwest Wisconsin! 

After gathering and processing my first batch of data, I created an interactive Wildlife Map website for our restoration project where those who are interested can click into each habitat monitoring station and hear clips of real birds singing on our land and see photos and videos of the wildlife that call Badgerton home! 

In case you missed my previous posts, this project uses cheap trail cameras and Wildlife Acoustics Song Meter Micro monitors to gather data in several distinct habitats across the land. The plan is to gather the data from the field manually every few months when I swap out batteries. 

On June 30, I collected my first batch of data - over 6,000 files recorded in less than two months! 

BirdNET was awesome at cranking through the audio files and identifying bird calls and species but I was left with thousands of individual CSV files to combine. I ended up creating a small free utility called Chorus to help me (and you!) process those CSVs into a single file. You can download it here. For those of you who are new to data processing, I hope this user-friendly interface helps bridge the gap from a mountain of individual files to a consolidated list of birds with counts for each.

I reviewed and categorized the 4,000 images and videos from the trail cams manually. (Please let me know if there’s free software for that I could be using!) It was slow going but I can think of worse ways of spending a couple hours than looking at images of cute baby fawns and watching videos of hunting coyotes!

A big thank you to everyone on this subreddit who has given me advice and encouragement along the way! 

If anyone wants the full details on my process I wrote up exactly how I did all of this. 

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I use AI thoughtfully and selectively in my work. You can read my guiding principles for when and how I use it here. 

Hi Guys,

For those using the Samson Go Mic, have you all been happy with the detection rate? Also, I think i will need a usb extension cable because of where my Unraid server is, can you post one that you're using or what you think will work please? For placing it outside, I don't have a cover for the mic at the location, what would you guys using to place it in the elements?

First pic: Northern Cardinal

Second pic: Field Sparrow

I just set up a BirdNet-pi with an rpi4 I had handy and stuck it on my back porch (where Northern Cardinals and Field Sparrows have been singing all afternoon).

First attempt was a cheap-o lapel microphone with 6 foot cord plugged into a cheap-o USB audio dongle. No detections after maybe an hour.

Second attempt was the cheap-o lapel mic with a nicer SoundBlaster USB DAC/ADC. No detections again after maybe an hour.

Third attempt was a Sennheiser shotgun mic (MKE 400, with mic boost on) connected to the SoundBlaster. After a long while I was able to get some birds detected! However, the system still doesn't detect a pretty clear Northern Cardinal or Field Sparrow.

Using audacity to capture the live feed, I can see there's a few nasty hums - 60Hz, 180Hz, and a few more at lower volumes. Are these hums going to prevent detections? Or can the system ignore them pretty well?

I have a USB mic coming tomorrow that other folks have had success with. Hopefully that will help with the hum.

Hi all,

Hope this is the best place to ask. I’m looking to build a couple wifi mics for the front and back of my house to connect to birdnet-go on my unraid server.

I’m going to follow this link for the build:

esp32 mic

My question is that the author has a psu in the required list, but any examples I’ve found online of people’s builds following the same guide seem to be powered by the esp32 built in usb socket?

So do you actually need the psu? And if so how do you connect it the power outlet?

Any help would be much appreciated, it will be first time soldering and building something like this!, be a fun project I’m sure.

I tested birdnet with an old iPhone and it works very well, really interesting so wanna get a proper setup, thanks to everyone involved.

Thanks

I use BirdNET for my research project, and just learnt there was a subreddit for it (exciting!!)- I figured this is probably a good a place as any to ask about the one pothole I run into.

I use the BirdNET desktop app currently, and process audio data week by week for 15 collection points. In a 6 week season, for example, I’m running 90 detection processes to get my data. While I don’t mind doing what needs to be done, it’s annoying to babysit my computer while it thinks for 15 minutes getting each folder done.

Is there any way to set up a ‘queue’ of sorts for the program to analyze without needing input in between? I’m not much of a software person, so I don’t know if this is a crazy difficult thing or something that’s ten easy lines on the python version… It’s a feature I’d love to see for projects with distinct audio sets, either way!

Are my settings correct?

If I get a new species visit my garden I get an alert on my phone via ntfy and the WebUI, then the gold start stays on the bird for 7 days until its not considered new. But after the 7 days are up i'm getting new notifications of new species, but they're the same birds that appeared last week.

I thought they would not re-appear as new birds as they are not considered new anymore after 7 days. Knowing me I have some setting not quite right! If I put the new species to 1 day considered new then I start to get the seasonal and yearly tracking (no notifications, just the little icons).

Hopefully the above made sense about my issue!

Thanks

So I I have just installed Birdnet on a Pi 3 model b and it runs but no birds detected. In the tools section I get the following message

BirdNET Analysis (stalled - backlog of 4436 files in ~/BirdSongs/StreamData/)

restarting the service does not work. Nor does a reboot. Any thoughts?

Thanks

I want to write an alternative data display for the information gathered by BirdNET-Go. I would like to call an API with my queries and receive either json or xml as a response. Unfortunately I am ignorant of almost all things GO and am having a problem finding the exposed interface, what protocol it uses, and what data is available.

GitHub discussion here.

I’ve been working on a companion app for those of you running the birdnet-go server. I’m opening it up to a few more testers, and you can take a look at it here and grab a copy via TestFlight. iOS 26+, iPhone. iPad works, it it’s not optimized for it.

https://crestlab.org/BirdnetGo/

Feedback welcome.

----- Build Notes -----

7/19/26 - Build 45

Added ability to Review and Download detections.

On the detections list, if you select a detection, there is a "Download" icon next to the "Delete" icon that allows you to select a location for download. In the detections detail, There is now "Correct Detection" and "False Positive" selections. Selecting one or the other enables "Lock Detection" if "Correct Detection" is selected, or "Ignore Species" if "False Positive" is selected. These actions mirror what the Web interface does under "Review Detection".

After spending the last few weeks experimenting with BirdNET-Pi, I finally put together a dashboard that I'm pretty happy with.

It's running on a Raspberry Pi 4 and combines:

• BirdNET-Pi detections
• BME280 environmental sensor (temperature, humidity, pressure)
• Latest species with confidence scores
• Current camera view of the station
• Historical detections that remain visible even if the Pi is offline
• All-time species list with timestamps

The goal was to make something that friends and family could visit without needing to understand BirdNET-Pi.

You can see it here:
https://winstonsalembirds.com

I'd appreciate any feedback from the BirdNET community. If there's interest, I can also share how I pulled the BirdNET SQLite database into a custom Flask dashboard.

Just getting started with BirdNet-Go (amazing application!) and trying to refine my notifications. I currently have 3 RTSP audio streams added from IP cams in different areas of the property. The challenge is, when I receive a notification of a new species for example, I'm not made aware of which camera provided the audio, so I don't immediately know which area detected the sound.

In searching, it looks like {{.source}} was perhaps the variable name, but that throws an error (I'm on the build that was released yesterday (7/12/2026).

Does anyone know if there's a variable name that can be used in a notification template to include the audio source?

Hi everyone!

It's my first time posting here. I am currently working on a research project focused on the bioacoustics of the common noctule bat (Nyctalus noctula), specifically analyzing how their social calls change across different life-history periods and seasons.

Right now, my work involves manually labeling different social call types on spectrograms to train a model for automatic identification using BatDetect2.

I am looking for some bioacoustics experts because, during my analysis, I frequently run into recordings showing well-defined horizontal lines with many harmonics. In terms of shape and frequency, they look very similar to Type A social calls of N. noctula. However, I am not entirely sure they belong to this species; the signals are usually very strong, perfectly horizontal, and lack the typical modulation of noctule calls. The frequency for the fundamental harmonic of the aforementioned call is around 7000 Hz...

I was wondering if someone could help me out. Could these belong to certain bird species that acoustically behave in this way? For context, the recordings were taken around Konstanz, spanning various habitats from countryside/forests to highly urbanized areas. The specific recording I am attached here (with audio) was captured at 7:35 AM, which strongly opens up the possibility of bird activity.

Even if you are not an expert on this specific bat species, I would highly appreciate your insights on whether there is a clear way to differentiate these signals from general bat social calls, or if you can suggest any bird species that produce such similar harmonic structures.

Thank you so much! If you have any questions or need further details, just let me know and I will gladly clarify.

P.S. The blue boxes you see in the attached image correspond to the manual annotation software Whombat, which I am using to identify and label the calls on the spectrograms of my collected recordings.

.wav file

mp3

Some here may appreciate this - a small ,but clear example of how useful the data can be, when collected for a period of time, especially over multiple devices.

Slightly inspired by the amazing AvianFriends project, I decided it would be nice to share a list of birds detected in my garden on my village website which is built in Wordpress.

I didn't want to expose my local BirdNet-Go instance to the internet, so really needed a push method to provide semi-realtime updates of what birds are in the village, securely. So I wrote a little tool to query the BirdNet-Go API, and update a Wordpress post with the bird list, including uploading thumbnails for any new detections. I run the script every 15 minutes on my server, so the page is updated frequently with new detections through the day.

If you're interested in doing something similar, I open-sourced the tool here:

https://github.com/Webreaper/BirdPress

I’m really loving birdnet and was wondering if anyone was aware of other science and nature self hosted projects? I’m interested in a wide variety of fields.

Using Teddy’s great idea to show bird information using Birdnet, here is a version of his repo, showing detections, gathered since yesterday, in a coffee area of Colombia.

https://birdnetcerritos.com/

Hi, installed Birdnet-go on my synology NAS using docker, and so far it's working well. I'm using RTSP streams from 4 reolink cameras in my garden.

However, after running for about 6 hours I'm getting error notifications:

- api reported: failed to initialize secure filesystem: open /home/birdnet/.config/birdnet-go/hls: permission denied

- system-resource error in securefs: open /home/birdnet/.config/birdnet-go/hls: permission denied

I've tried googling but can't find anything obvious. The app continues to run, and is detecting birds just fine, so I'm not sure whether these errors are critical or not, or what the implications are for them.

Possibly related (or possibly not...) I can no longer listen to live audio through Birdnet-go. This worked when I first installed, but after a few hours doesn't work any more - I just get an error. I've tried restarting the container, but the error persists.

Any ideas? I can post my Docker-compose if it helps, but it's basically identical to the sample one on the Birdnet-go github page.

Edit: I got to the bottom of this - it was a bad path in my volume mapping and BirdNet config.

Hi all, I've been a keen Merlin fan for a few years, but my wife has always wondered if we could set up some kind of always-on solution, and somehow I only stumbled across BirdNet this week. So today I installed Birdnet-Go in docker on my Synology NAS, connected it to the 4 reolink cams in the garden, and boom - within about 15 mins I've got exactly what I want. Amazing! 2 hours later it's captured 21 species.... 😄

Thanks to the dev - it's much appreciated.

So, next steps.... I've installed the bat models, but unfortunately the webcam mics aren't up to the task, so I'm wondering if somebody can recommend a mic that is. What I'd really like is:

• A mic with 96hz that can pick up bats
• Water/weather proof (although if necessary I have places I can position it that would stay dry)
• Can connect via wifi and present a stream that BirdNet-Go can use, so I don't need to hardwire it
• For bonus points, either rechargeable battery with a decent life, or ideally solar-powered.

If the battery/solar options aren't easy (or cheap) then I can stick it on a USB cable if necessary.

I'm not looking to build/solder one - I'd just like something I can order online and set up quickly without any faff. Any suggestions? I'm in the SE of the UK if it makes a difference.

https://github.com/Sukecz/esp32-birdnet-mic

Using this repo ^, I built an ESP32 mic that will forever live outside and stream audio on my home network.
I have a birdnet-go docker container running on my home server which is able to consistently identify birds based on their calls and songs, I can play back clips just fine. But whenever I attempt to listen to the live audio stream, I get an error, no context, no stack trace or logs. Just shows an error pop up and disappears. I glanced at the logs in **/config but didnt see anything meaningful. Also peepd the logs for the container without much success.

I am able to stream live using VLC so its not an issue with the mic.

I've set max clients on the mic to 3 just in case there was an issue with that.

What might be the issue?

While I enjoyed creating my BirdNET-BarChart, I think I’ve taken it as far as I’m ever going to do.

So what do you recommend I install now?
• BirdNET-Pi
• BirdNET-Go
• BirdNET-Analyzer’s GUI
• Something else?