Basic Pitch
A lightweight audio-to-MIDI converter from Spotify's Audio Intelligence Lab. Give it a recording of an instrument or a vocal melody, and it writes a MIDI file, including pitch bends.
- Type MIDI
- Difficulty Easy
- Hardware Ordinary CPU is enough. The official library supports macOS, Linux, and Windows. The accompanying website transcribes in the browser and states that audio stays on your machine.
- License Apache License 2.0
What it does
Basic Pitch is an automatic music transcription library. It is instrument-agnostic, can handle more than one note at a time, and writes pitch-bend data into the MIDI, which matters for parts that slide or bend.
The project is clear about the main limit: it works best on one instrument at a time. A full rap mix, with drums, 808, and a vocal stacked together, is not the intended input. A guitar hook, a hummed melody, a piano sketch, or a solo synth line is.
You can use it three ways: the website basicpitch.io, a command-line tool after installing the Python package, or the Python API.
Why it matters for hip-hop
A lot of rap production starts as a hummed hook, a phone voice note, or a melody you played once and did not record as MIDI. Basic Pitch turns that into notes you can drop into Live, FL, LMMS, or any DAW, then fix timing and velocity by hand.
It will not transcribe a whole beat perfectly, and you should expect to tidy the MIDI. Used on a single part, it saves a lot of hunt-and-peck on the piano roll. After you have the MIDI, you can replay the line with Surge XT or whatever instrument you actually want on the record.
Getting it running
If you only want to try one file, use the official website. If you want it in your regular workflow, installing the Python package is enough on a normal machine. No GPU is required. By default the library picks a lighter runtime and does not install full TensorFlow unless you ask for it or you are on a newer Python version.
License notes
Apache 2.0 is a permissive software license. You can use the tool, including in commercial sessions, as long as you keep the required notices if you redistribute the software. The license covers the software, not the song you transcribe. If you feed it a copyrighted recording, you still need whatever rights that use requires.