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Comment by joshuahedlund | Hacker News Reader

The Merlin app by Cornell Lab of Ornithology is fantastic for identifying bird sounds in real-time. Besides the machine-learning tech the overall app is a great experience, clearly made by talented developers who probably also love birds and dogfood the product. Every thing about it is tailored to quickly giving you all the information you need to look up what kinds of birds to expect in different areas at different times of year and quickly narrow down possible candidates.

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I've been a user of BirdNet (also from Cornell, but apparently a different group?), looking forward to checking out Merlin. With Birdnet you have to record a sound, pick out the specific portion of the audio and click identify.

Anybody use the BirdNet Analyzer? https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET-Analyzer

I've tried setting it up with the birdnetlib package but had trouble getting it running with a model and pack that was for my region. The default model for birdnetlib is in Europe.

I had https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi running last summer with great success. Might be worth a look.

One could say BirdNet is the "pro" tool. Merlin uses much of the same sound database and AI but as you've seen - is automated - set it recording and it will mark every bird sound it can hear and identify.

Another good one is SongSleuth[1] - recently recommended to me by Nathan Pieplow because it has a "pre-record" buffer so you can hit record as or immediately after you hear a bird and it captures a few seconds before that instead of having to run Merlin continuously waiting for the bird to call next.

[1] http://www.songsleuth.com/

[2] https://earbirding.com/blog/author

Merlin is automatic and realtime. There does currently seem to be a bug with recordings. It will highlight the wrong bird in the set during playback even though it was correct when the live recording was made.

Also love Merlin app and my life since finding it. A few years ago I kept hearing a beautiful and haunting bird song on hikes but after asking other hikers nobody could tell me what bird it was!

Enter Merlin app and it picked it up easily as a Swainson's Thrush so I am forever grateful to the technology.

Merlin identified a Swainson's hawk for me recently - first I'd ever seen!

The Swainson's Thrush has such a beautiful, haunting song.

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