Check out Spotify’s free audio to MIDI converter
Image Credit: Spotify
Basic Pitch by Spotify is a MIDI converter for guitar, vocals, and more, online for free for you to use right now.
Spotify has made a free MIDI converter that uses machine learning to transcribe your recording instantly. Basic Pitch is an online audio to MIDI converter with polyphonic and pitch bend detection.
Audio to midi conversion isn’t by no means a new invention, but Spotify says that Basic Pitch is more capable than many other converters, as well as being faster.
With instant MIDI conversion, there’s no need for a MIDI keyboard or to click into a piano roll in a DAW, and you don’t have to write down musical ideas by hand. Basic Pitch can detect multiple notes simultaneously from a variety of instruments.
Basic Pitch was first created for use in Soundtrap, a Spotify-owned DAW, and is a tool made jointly by the Soundtrap team and Spotify’s Audio Intelligence Lab. With nothing to download, the software is light on processors and energy use.
Spotify says it’s great for producers who aren’t confident using a keyboard and struggle with software. You can sing a melody or play one on whatever instrument you like and Basic Pitch will convert it into MIDI notes. Your data isn’t kept, and nothing is uploaded to a server.
Historically its been hard for a computer to separate the expressive playing of a live performance. But the research team found that even vocal performances were accurately recreated by the machine learning, as well as picking up on pitch bends from instruments like the guitar.
You can download the MIDI data to whack into your DAW, and through the magic of MIDI transform the notes into any instrument. The tool is open source, which means anyone can use it and tinker with it.
Spotify said: “Now that Basic Pitch is out there for music creators, software engineers, and researchers to use, develop, and build upon, we can’t wait to see what everyone does with it. No matter how much we test a model in our experiments, there’s still nothing like seeing how it performs out in the wild, with real-world use cases. In this initial version of Basic Pitch, we expect to discover many areas for improvement, along with new possibilities for how it could be used.”
Go to BasicPitch.io to try it out, or download the code from GitHub to play around with the software. There’s also demo tracks of songs made using the tool so you can hear for yourself what it can do: