Is there good software for transcribing music from a recording yet?

August 8, 2024 5:44 PM

Sometimes, in ambitious moments when I forget my rather drastic musical limitations, I want to try playing the piano parts to standards I've found recordings of where the piano part is either the only instrumental or can stand on its own. I don't have a good enough ear to transcribe it or play by ear. I found a pretty expensive transcription service but it's not really worth it (vide supra: musical limitations.) Is there software to do this now, in this age of near singularity?
posted by less-of-course to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I haven’t looked into this recently but this looks like a decent-ish survey of current options: https://verbit.ai/transcription/the-best-music-transcription-software/
posted by graphweaver at 6:04 PM on August 8 [2 favorites]

Apple's Logic Pro (running on Apple silicon, not Intel) can take an audio file and split it into stems, isolating drums, bass, vocals and everything else that doesn't fall into the first 3 categories into 4 separate audio tracks. While it can't then take a piano track and turn it into musical notation, it's possible to convert an audio track like that into a MIDI track. That replaces the audio waveforms with individual MIDI notes, and the MIDI can be converted into musical notation. In my experience, the audio > MIDI conversion track needs a lot of tinkering to remove extraneous notes, but I enjoy that sort of thing.

Long way around, and not exactly the "transcribe this for me" service you desire, but it could work.
posted by emelenjr at 7:43 PM on August 8 [2 favorites]

I did a quick look around for AI transcription models (which are your best bet) and found this (free) app (Windows/Android). Haven't tried it.

Apple's Logic Pro (running on Apple silicon, not Intel) can take an audio file and split it into stems, isolating drums, bass, vocals and everything else that doesn't fall into the first 3 categories into 4 separate audio tracks.

You can also do this easily with the Intel OpenVINO plugins for Audacity. I have tried it, it works impressively well.
posted by neckro23 at 7:40 AM on August 9 [1 favorite]

Have you looked for tabs or fake books of the songs in question? Or do you want a specific recording?
posted by fiercekitten at 8:06 AM on August 9

I have used transcribe by seventhstring software a lot.
posted by TwoToneRow at 10:20 PM on August 10