Free Audio to MIDI Converter
Turn a recording into editable MIDI — drop one instrument, pick what it is, and get a .mid you can drag into any DAW. Guitar, vocals, and melodies convert free in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Why some modes are free and others use a credit
Guitar, vocals, and melodies convert right here in your browser — free, instant, and your audio never leaves your device. Bass, piano, and drums need something heavier: they run on dedicated cloud machines that cost real money every second they run — pitch-bend tracking for bass, the sustain pedal for piano, splitting a kit into its parts for drums — so each uses one credit (bass and piano ~25¢, drums ~50¢ because it splits the kit and hands those parts back too).
It's a rule we hold to everywhere on Selekt: we only charge when a tool needs serious cloud hardware to run — never for anything that can run free in your browser.
How it works
- Bring one instrument. Drop a single isolated part — a guitar, a vocal, a bassline — not a full mix. Clean, isolated audio is what converts well.
- Pick what it is. Select the matching instrument so the right model reads your audio. The pick matters — a wrong one returns nonsense.
- Convert. Guitar, vocals, and melodies convert free, right in your browser. Bass, piano, and drums use heavier cloud models.
- Preview & download. A/B your audio against the extracted MIDI, then download the .mid into any DAW.
Have a full song, not one part? You don't need this tool at all — the complete stem separator splits your track into up to 16 stems and extracts the MIDI for every one in a single pass. You walk away with the stems and the MIDI for the whole song at once — not one part at a time.
What audio-to-MIDI actually does (and its limits)
A converter doesn't read notes off a recording the way you read sheet music — it estimates them. The model (here, Spotify's open-source Basic Pitch) listens for where notes start, how long they ring, and what pitch they are, and writes its best guess as MIDI, preserving slides and vibrato as pitch-bend data.
That estimate is excellent on a clean, single instrument and falls apart on a dense mix — which is the whole reason this tool asks for one isolated part. A monophonic line (a vocal, a bassline) converts cleanest; thick chords, distortion, and full mixes are where ghost notes and octave errors creep in. Budget a few minutes to tidy the result, and you'll have a part you can re-voice, transpose, and rearrange freely.
Or skip the conversion entirely
If you don't have a stem to convert, you don't have to make one. We've already extracted MIDI from tens of thousands of cleared CC0 and public-domain recordings — already converted, already cleaned, already clear to release. Grab those free:
Audio to MIDI, answered
- Is this audio-to-MIDI converter free?
- Guitar, vocal, and melody conversion is completely free and runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded. Bass, piano, and drums use heavier cloud models (pitch-bends, the sustain pedal, kit-splitting) that run on dedicated hardware, so those cost a small credit. We only ever charge when a tool needs that cloud hardware.
- Does my audio get uploaded to a server?
- For the free browser modes — guitar, vocal, melody — no. The whole conversion runs on your own device with TensorFlow.js, so your audio never leaves the browser. Most online converters upload your file; this one does not.
- Why can’t I just convert a whole song?
- Audio-to-MIDI estimates one instrument at a time. Feed it a full mix and the notes of the bass, keys, and vocals tangle together into a muddy result (the bass-octave trap is the classic example). The fix isn’t to convert each part by hand — the complete stem separator splits the track into stems AND extracts the MIDI for every one in a single pass, so you get the stems and the MIDI for the whole song at once.
- Will the MIDI be a perfect transcription?
- No tool gives a perfect one — audio-to-MIDI estimates pitch and timing, it doesn’t read sheet music off the recording. Expect to tidy a few ghost notes or octave errors (usually 10–20 minutes a song). Clean, monophonic parts convert far better than dense or distorted ones.
- Can I use the converted MIDI commercially?
- Convert audio you have the rights to — your own stems, CC0, or public domain. Converting a copyrighted track produces a derivative work of a protected composition, which doesn’t clear it. If you want MIDI that’s already cleared, browse our free MIDI library instead.
