Can it be used as a frontend for a birdnet-pi database?

[alexbelgium]

Hi, your frontend is nice. Can it be used as a frontend for a birdnet-pi sqlite database ? Or is the database structure too different ?

[Suncuss]

thanks! yes. I just pushed new features for that :) now you can import the birdnet db file to all all the records moved over. it also has the additonal option of migrating the audio files over and re generating spectrogram.

[alexbelgium]

That’s great thanks ! I’m starting to build an homeassistant addon for it in my repo : https://github.com/alexbelgium/hassio-addons

[dalogue1]

I have questions on migration from a BirdNET-Pi instance based on the following plan:

1. Backup my existing NVMe drive to an SD card
2. Install a fresh OS on the RPi5
3. Install BirdNET-PiPy
4. Import my previous database and files from the SD card
5. Configure all settings including the BirdWeather ID for reporting

My questions are:

• For point number 2, what is the best OS to install? Raspberry Pi OS (Bookworm) 64-bit or Raspberry Pi OS (Trixie) or Ubuntu 24.04/25.04

• For point number 4, is importing from the SD card backup cleanly supported in the UI or will I need to mount drives and issue terminal commands to cleanly migrate my data.

Note: I have a RPi5 4GB with NVMe drive running Raspberry Pi OS (Bookworm) 64-bit.

[Suncuss]

thanks for your interest!

I personally have it tested both on bookworm and trixie, I would go with the newer trixie if you start from fresh.

Pi 5 4GB sounds plenty good.

For database migration simply drag and upload will work. For importing audio and re generating spectrogram. You would need to move the audio folder to the data folder if BirdNET-PiPy directory. More info on the user interface.

let me know if you run into any issue!

[dalogue1]

Which version of Trixie is best to use?

Raspberry Pi OS, Raspberry Pi OS Full, or Raspberry Pi Lite

[Suncuss]

I would prefer the full version since that's where i do most of my development and test. But we user running it perfectly fine on Lite as well. (major differen is that thef full version comes with pipewire audio server already, where on the lite version our installtation script will install pulseaudio)

[dalogue1]

I created a new instance of Trixie (full version) and ran the install script with no problem.

The import of the birds.db file worked fine but the audio import would never show the directory name for the import. After attempting the import multiple times the Settings tab began showing an error. At that point, I stopped to try again later.

Would it be better to go back to Bookworm or to stick with Trixie? I copied the ~/BirdSongs/Extracted directory to the data directory as specified but it was never shown to be selected. I guess I could just forego regenerating the spectrograms since the .

[Suncuss]

Does the error message say “No folders with audio files found. Copy your files to the data folder and refresh.” or “No matching audio files found. Ensure files match your imported database records.”

[dalogue1]

Do you mean copy the individual audio files to the data directory or the date stamped directories to the data directory? There are several hundred directories under the Extracted directory each named by date. (Does it search only one directory deep?)