Transcription — writing down the notes you hear — used to mean hours of rewinding the same three seconds. Automatic music transcription changes that. An AI model listens to a recording and estimates every note’s pitch, start and length, giving you a draft in seconds. You still bring the musicianship, but you no longer start from a blank page.
This guide explains how to use Play Piano Live’s free piano transcription, what to expect from it, and how to turn the result into something you can practice or print.
What automatic piano transcription does
You give it audio. It gives you notes: each with a pitch (which key), an onset (when it starts), an offset (when it stops) and a velocity (how loud). That is precisely the information in a piano roll and in a MIDI file, so the output can be played back on a virtual piano, edited in a DAW or turned into sheet music in notation software.
Play Piano Live uses Basic Pitch, an open-source model from Spotify’s Audio Intelligence Lab. It is polyphonic — it can hear chords, not just single melodies — and it runs entirely inside your browser, so your audio is never uploaded. If you’re curious about the technology, read how AI music transcription works.
Step by step
- Open the transcription tool.
- Add audio. Drop in an MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG or FLAC file, or press Record from microphone and play or sing. Up to ten minutes at a time.
- Wait a few seconds. The model downloads once (about a megabyte), then analyses your audio. A progress bar shows how long is left. Short clips finish in seconds on most laptops and phones.
- Press Play. The notes fall onto the keyboard and play on a grand piano. Drag the Original slider up to blend in your recording and hear where they differ.
- Tune the Notes setting. Fewer drops faint and very short notes; More keeps quiet inner voices. It changes instantly, without re-running the AI.
- Use it. Download the MIDI, or press Practice this song to learn it with falling notes and a wait mode.
What works best
| Source audio | What to expect |
|---|---|
| Solo piano, recorded clearly | The best results. Most notes, rhythms and chords come through. |
| Piano with light accompaniment | Good. Expect a few extra notes from the other instruments. |
| Full band or pop mix | A usable sketch of melody, bass and harmony, with extra notes from drums, vocals and guitars. |
| Singing or whistling | Works well for melodies — hum a tune and get its notes. |
| Heavily reverberant or noisy recordings | Notes blur together; expect more cleanup. |
Ten ways to get cleaner transcriptions covers recording tips and settings in detail.
From transcription to sheet music
The tool outputs a piano roll and a standard MIDI file. To see traditional notation, open the MIDI file in free notation software such as MuseScore, which converts it to a score. Expect to tidy it: automatic transcriptions record exactly when notes were played, while sheet music needs notes snapped to beats, so you may need to set the tempo, choose a quantise value and fix the split between the hands.
From transcription to practice
This is where the tool shines. Press Practice this song and the transcription opens in Practice mode, where you can:
- learn the right hand alone while the left plays automatically,
- loop the hardest bar and slow it to 50%,
- switch on Wait for me so the music pauses until you play the right note.
That turns any recording into a lesson — the main reason we built it.
Is it legal to transcribe a song?
Transcribing music you hear for your own study is a long-standing part of learning music. Sharing, publishing or selling a transcription or MIDI file of someone else’s copyrighted song is different and usually needs permission from the rights holder. When in doubt, keep it personal or use your own recordings and public-domain music.
Frequently asked questions
Is the piano transcription really free?
Yes — no account, no limit on songs and no watermark. It runs on your device, so it costs us nothing per song and stays free.
Can it transcribe a YouTube video?
Not from a link. Downloading audio from YouTube and similar platforms is against their terms. You can transcribe recordings you own or make yourself, including a microphone recording of a piano.
How accurate is it?
On a clean solo piano recording it gets the large majority of notes right. It struggles most with very fast passages drowned in pedal, extremely quiet notes and dense mixes. Always check the result by ear.
Does it work offline?
Yes, once the model has been cached. Install the app and transcription works with no connection.
Try it now: everything in this guide works in the free a song for free. For lessons, backing tracks and transcriptions, subscribe to GrooveForte on YouTube.