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Hardware & Audio Sources

You don’t need much — a Raspberry Pi (or any Linux box) and something to listen with. This page helps you choose.

Which computer?

DeviceNotes
Raspberry Pi 5Recommended. Comfortable headroom for behavioral analytics and the live spectrogram.
Raspberry Pi 4B / 400Fully supported and very capable for everyday use.
Older 64-bit-capable Pis (3B+, Zero 2 W)Not a supported target. STABILITY lists the Pi 4, 5 and 400, and this repository records no test on a 3B+ or a Zero 2 W. The aarch64 binary needs the 64-bit Pi OS (a 32-bit OS cannot run it at all), and these boards have 1 GB and 512 MB of RAM, which is tight. If you try one anyway, turn analytics off to save memory: pass an empty value, --analytics-db "" (removing --analytics-db only falls back to <database>.duckdb, which leaves it on), as Troubleshooting shows.
Any x86_64 LinuxFully supported — an old laptop or mini-PC is a great always-on host.

BirdNet-Behavior is undemanding — there’s no Python interpreter or virtualenv resident around the model — so the limiting factor is usually storage for recordings, not compute. Budget about 1.5 GB free to start, most of it for recordings and the database (the default BirdNET V2.4 files are about 85 MB; the V3.0 preview’s are 541 MB).

Which microphone?

Any of these work — the goal is a clean signal, not an expensive one.

  • USB conference/lavalier mics and USB sound cards with an electret capsule are the easy default. They show up as an ALSA card (arecord -l) and need no drivers.
  • Dedicated USB measurement mics (e.g. an omnidirectional electret) give the best results outdoors.
  • An old USB webcam’s mic will even work for a first test.

What matters more than the mic:

  • Placement — outside, off a hard wall (which echoes), with a simple foam windscreen. Wind is the number-one source of false positives.
  • Levels — aim for peaks near −6 dB on the Audio settings level meter. Too hot clips the loudest calls; too quiet buries the faint ones.

RTSP cameras (no microphone hardware)

Many bird-box and feeder cameras expose an RTSP stream that carries audio. Point BirdNet-Behavior at the URL and it treats the camera as a microphone — no sound card required. You can run several streams at once.

BIRDNET_RTSP_URL=rtsp://cam.lan:554/stream
# or multiple, comma-separated:
BIRDNET_RTSP_URLS=rtsp://cam1.lan/stream,rtsp://cam2.lan/stream

RTSP capture needs ffmpeg on the host. When your config already has an RTSP_URL, the bare-metal installer (install/repair) installs it for you via apt, or prints the exact command if it can’t; the Docker image bundles it. Add the camera under Cameras and streams on the Capture tab — which also takes HTTP/Icecast, HLS, RTMP, UDP and SRT streams — and prefer TCP transport on busy Wi-Fi. --doctor checks that the address resolves and its port answers.

“Watch a folder” mode

If you already have a pile of recordings, BirdNet-Behavior can classify a folder of audio files instead of listening live — handy for batch-processing field recordings.

Next: Configuration to wire your choice in, then First Steps.