MP3 to MIDI that survives a real song

Every MP3 to MIDI converter demos beautifully on solo piano. Then you feed it an actual song and get note salad. Here is why, and what to use instead.

Why converters fail on full songs

A typical converter transcribes the whole mix in one pass. A hi-hat and a staccato chord look almost identical to it, a bassline reads as low piano, and a vocal melody smears into runs of wrong notes. The result technically contains your song, somewhere.

Separate first, transcribe second

klavery splits the recording into six instrument stems (vocals, drums, bass, guitar, piano, other) and transcribes only the keys. Drums cannot become piano notes when the transcriber never hears them. If the keys in your song are a synth or a music box rather than a real piano, that works too, which is where most tools give up.

How accurate?

On recordings of a real piano the transcription comes back close to note-perfect, sustain pedal included. On full band mixes it depends on how loud the keys sit in the mix; the preview tells you in thirty seconds whether it worked for your song.

Related: YouTube to MIDI, extract the piano from a song, or the honest comparison with other converters.