Audio to sheet music program.

[gstring]

Hello All

Is there a good program that can take piano music and write the music notation?

daniel

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by gstring

Hello All

Is there a good program that can take piano music and write the music notation?

daniel

If it's in midi form, yes. Most notation software will do that.
Audio, no.

That is, there are programs that claim to convert audio to notation - via digitisation and midi - but (so far) they are so unreliable, the results requiring extensive editing, that it's a whole lot quicker to transcribe it yourself.

You can get software to help with transcription - i.e. to help you listen as close as possible - if that's what you want. I recommend Transcribe: https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/screenshots.html
Notice the program offers guesses for the chord in that brief selection of the waveform (less than one beat), and each pitch it hears in that selection is set against a piano keyboard - mainly Bb, Ab, D, F and C, hence its guess of Bb9.

This is cheap software (in fact free for the first month) and it's easy to imagine that if this program can identify those pitches, surely it should be easy to translate those to notation? But the main issue is rhythm and metre. Software can easily recognise pitch - at least if the audio is in tune and clean enough (an important factor) - but where are the beats and what should the note values be?
Pulse in music is not too hard for software to recognise - there are programs (eg Riffstation) which can identifychords as a track plays, and get most of them right, and mostly in the right places. Is "most" good enough? Obviously not, if you don't know which ones are wrong.
Even for pitch, overtones can cause problems, with octaves being misidentified, or rogue harmonics being identified as played notes.

At best, audio-midi conversion programs offer a kind of rough sketch that you have to go through and fix - edit, correct, polish, fill in missing details, etc. Personally I've found that just wastes time. It's a little like programming a robot to cook you a meal. Even if it can be done, it's a whole lot easier and quicker - with the current state of technology (important proviso!) - to just do it yourself. So I'd rather record the audio in Transcribe and do it all myself from the start (notating by hand using other software) - sometimes with some hints from online if I can find them.

[gstring]

Thanks very much JonPR for your time and experience.

Thread can be closed/

daniel