Audio to sheet music: turn any recording into a score you can edit

A pianist, a guitarist and a drummer do not read the same kind of sheet music, so Midify does not give them the same page. Every part you choose is laid out for its instrument:

Recognising which notes were played is only half of turning audio into sheet music. A recording says a note started 12.84 seconds in and lasted 0.31 seconds. Sheet music needs to say it is a dotted eighth on the "and" of beat two in bar seven, in the right key, spelled the right way. Get that wrong and a perfectly good transcription turns into a page of ties, rests and odd tuplets nobody can read.

Midify works from the beat of the song rather than the clock. It finds the downbeats, the time signature and the key, then writes each note against the beat, so a singer drifting a little ahead or a band speeding up in the chorus still comes out as clean rhythms. Triplets are only written where the music really swings that way, and a shuffled groove can be written as straight eighths with a swing marking, the way a session player would expect.

Sharps and flats follow the key and the chords: over an E7 chord you get a G sharp, not an A flat. A readability setting runs from Simple to Detailed, so you can trade every grace note for a page you can sight-read, and see the result change as you move it.

Sheet music from audio starts with whatever recording you have. An MP3 or WAV of a finished track, a whole song with a band, or a phone recording of you singing all work; for your own voice, voice to sheet music is the quickest route. For a single instrument, the piano, guitar tab and drum pages explain how each part is written.

If you are choosing between tools rather than converting one song, music transcription software covers how the editor fits into a teacher's or arranger's week. And if what you need is audio to notes for a DAW rather than a page, the audio to MIDI converter gives you the same transcription as MIDI tracks.

No transcription is perfect, so every score opens in an editor rather than going straight to a PDF. Notes the transcription was unsure about are marked, and one key takes you to the next one. Press play and the original audio, or just that instrument separated from the mix, plays under a cursor that follows the score, so checking a bar takes seconds.

Fixing it is quick too. The arrow keys move a note, the number keys change its length, and a note can be moved to the other hand of a piano part or to another string of a guitar part. Every change is played back as you make it, and undo is always there.

Some recordings make better sheet music than others. It is worth knowing which before you start: