Audio to MIDI Converter

What To Feed It

• Great: solo synth leads, basslines, vocal toplines, piano and guitar parts, whistled or hummed ideas
• Workable: sparse loops where one instrument dominates
• Poor: full club mixes and dense arrangements; too many sources compete for the same frequencies

How Neural Transcription Works

Classic pitch detectors track one note at a time and fall apart on chords. basic-pitch works differently: the network looks at a time-frequency image of the audio and predicts, for every moment, which of 88 piano pitches are sounding, where notes begin, and how the pitch bends within them. That is why it handles polyphony (chords, overlapping notes) and why it outputs pitch-bend information that most converters throw away. The trade-off of its small size is sensitivity to noise: percussive and breathy sounds sometimes register as faint spurious notes, which is what the cleanup pass in your DAW is for.

Cleaning Up Transcribed MIDI

• Delete the dust first: notes shorter than a 64th are almost always transcription noise, not music
• Check the key: detect the source's key, then look for isolated notes far outside its scale; most are artifacts
• Quantize last, not first; hearing the raw timing tells you which notes are real before you snap everything to the grid
• Octave errors cluster on basslines; if a bass part jumps an octave for one note, it usually did not

A Producer Workflow That Works

Hum or play the idea into your phone, drop the recording here, and pull the MIDI into your DAW with your own sounds. To reharmonize a transcribed part against a track you are working with, check the track's key with the Song Key & BPM Finder and see which notes belong using the scale finder.

Frequently Asked Questions