Good app for transcribing mp3s?
January 10, 2020 9:07 AM   Subscribe

I love this music And want to play it on the piano.

I downloaded a free trial of AnthemScore and recorded the first five minutes of the music with Audacity. I then fed the mp3 into AnthemScore, but the sheet music it produced of the first is pretty terrible — just doesn’t sound like the music. I understand that a complicating factor might be that there is also a bass playing (and drums), but I don’t think that’s really the problem.

Any suggestions for software/app that might work better with this YouTube/mp3 situation? I have a new iPad as well as a PC I could use. Thanks.
posted by DMelanogaster to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Response by poster: “Of the first” should have been deleted—- poor editing, sorry
posted by DMelanogaster at 9:08 AM on January 10, 2020


I know a bit about how this kind of signal processing works. This would be an incredibly complex task for a computer.

That said, I don't know if anyone has put in the enormous(ly unrewarded) effort of trying to make this happen, but if they have, it will almost certainly be error prone and basically unreadable without a lot of human intervention.

I hope someone proves me wrong, but just wanted to chime in and tell you that, if it seems like this isn't a thing that exists, it probably really is a thing that doesn't exist.

I bet there are loads of humans who would do this quite well for super cheap though! Try fiverr.
posted by nosila at 10:34 AM on January 10, 2020 [1 favorite]


To date, no software application can yet completely fulfill James Moorer’s definition of automatic music transcription. However, the pursuit of automatic music transcription has spawned the creation of many software applications which can aid in manual transcription. Some can slow down music while maintaining original pitch and octave, some can track the pitch of melodies, some can track the chord changes, and others can track the beat of music.

From Wikipedia, here.

TLDR: it doesn’t really exist, sorry.
posted by SaltySalticid at 12:59 PM on January 10, 2020


Given the above, maybe the Soundslice website would help? It has a tool to help you manually transcribe music from YouTube videos.
posted by fabius at 9:49 AM on January 11, 2020 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: Thanks but I can't hear the individual notes in chords. As per a response above, I hired somebody (in Venezuela!) on Fiverr to transcribe the piece for me -- we'll see how it goes! Oh and I did contact the composers-- they didn't have transcription available. Thanks for all the help!
posted by DMelanogaster at 11:22 AM on January 13, 2020


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