Custom species lists dont seem to work when selecting Perch as classifier

[KristianBell]

I may be doing something wrong, but custom species lists don’t appear to work when Perch is selected as the classifier.

As a test, I first ran Perch on a set of audio files with no species list applied, and it returned a range of detections as expected. I then created a custom species list containing a small subset of those same species and reran Perch on the identical audio. In this case, it returned no detections at all.

I’ve tried this with both very short and longer species lists, and the behaviour is consistent: as soon as a custom species list is selected, Perch fails to return any detections. I’ve double-checked spelling, formatting, and syntax in the .txt species list, so I don’t think that’s the issue.

This makes me wonder whether custom species lists are currently unsupported or not being applied correctly for Perch in the GUI.

Just flagging this in case it’s a known limitation or something obvious I’m missing.

[gitmatt19]

I just was trying perch also and noticed it was only using scientific names with no common name so I'm guessing that is the issue and my custom "Normal" name list did not work either.

I have not tried making a custom list that is ScientificName_ScientificName to see if that worked as perch was taking 10x the CPU and yielding poorer results for my area.

[KristianBell]

I tried ScientificName_ScientificName as well but that didnt return any results either.

[Mattk70]

Did you read the docs?

Species names need to consist of scientific name_common name to be valid. If you want to use the Perch model, you have to use their naming convention, which is just scientific name. For examples check the respective label files.

I think it's quite clear and if you do as instructed, custom lists work perfectly. For example this custom list:

Tyto alba
Melanitta nigra

Only returns detections for these two species.

The only other gotcha is that the taxonomies of the two models differ. For example, BirdNET, which uses Clements list, uses "Charadrius morinellus" for the Eurasian Dotterel. Perch which uses Birdlife International, calls this "Eudromias morinellus", so double check your scientific name is in the Perch label file. If it isn't, Google the common name for equivalent / closest match* scientific name in the Birdlife list.

*Closest match: there may not be an exact match. For example, Birdlife lumps Redpolls as Acanthis flammea, Birdnet still has 3 variants.

[KristianBell]

Thanks so much, I missed that section in the docs but will try again now. Much appreciated.