Setting Up a Remote BirdNET Microphone on a Raspberry Pi

Setting up a remote BirdNET microphone on a Raspberry Pi is a great way to pick up bird calls from the other end of the garden, but it's no use if you have to SSH in and start the stream by hand every time it reboots. Here's how I got the whole thing coming up on its own at boot. What you need A Pi with Raspberry Pi OS installed A working USB sound card and microphone (I'm using a Soundblaster Play! 3 and a Clippy EM272 Mono Microphone) mediamtx already downloaded on the Pi. I used the standalone binary version. If you don't want anyone on your local network listening to your microphone, you can host the stream via Tailscale and lock it down that way. See the end of this post for how to use the firewall to achieve this. The Plan To achieve our goal, we will implement two services. mediamtx.service runs the actual mediamtx streaming server audio-stream.service runs ffmpeg, capturing from ALSA and pushing the audio to mediamtx over RTSP. This is what BirdNET will connect to. The audio…