I know that the Focusrite Scarlett is lovely and shielded and all, but how far is it from the Raspberry Pi? I found that unless my USB interface was physically far (at the end of a long USB extension) I got a lot of noise.
Also: have you set the gain from the BirdNet app (using the mixer control)? Your recording is very quiet.
I had good luck with a very simple setup in 2023 (details: The Joy of BirdNetPi): a Raspberry Pi 3B+, a USB extension cable, an extremely grotty ($2) USB sound card and a desktop mic poked out the back window. Magpies I can't help you with (I live in the one part of Canada that they don't), but some equivalent bird recordings I made might be:
Also: have you set the gain from the BirdNet app (using the mixer control)? Your recording is very quiet.
I had good luck with a very simple setup in 2023 (details: The Joy of BirdNetPi): a Raspberry Pi 3B+, a USB extension cable, an extremely grotty ($2) USB sound card and a desktop mic poked out the back window. Magpies I can't help you with (I live in the one part of Canada that they don't), but some equivalent bird recordings I made might be:
- Blue Jay
- Common Grackle — not corvids, I know, but have the same loud strutting presence as magpies
- Common Raven — in a rare moment when our local goofball ravens were making raven noises.
Statistics: Posted by scruss — Thu Oct 09, 2025 10:37 pm