Audio to MIDI Converter
Turn your 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 — completely private: nothing is uploaded, nothing is saved anywhere, you just download your result.
Audio becomes notes you can reshape
Pick an instrument, then compare A · Audio with its extracted B · MIDI. Change the sound underneath the MIDI to hear why the result is more than a transcription.
Why does B sound plainer?
MIDI isn’t audio — it’s just the notes: which note, when, and how hard. Your browser plays them on a generic bass. Drop the same MIDI into your DAW with your own bass sound and it becomes whatever you want. A is the reference performance; B is the editable clay.
Open this sample →Keep the original for A/B, map the notes onto new sounds, and shape the arrangement.
Synth and single-note melody recordings use this same melodic extraction path. For deeper sound mapping, arrangement, tempo, and key controls, open the result in Stem Lab.
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).
New here? Try it free. Start the free trial and get credits to run bass, piano & drums on us, so you can test it before paying anything. The 7-day Gumroad trial requires a payment method and renews at $5/month or $50/year unless canceled before it ends.
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, public-domain, and CC-BY recordings — already converted, already cleaned, and ready to use under the source terms. CC-BY attribution is shown with the file. 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.
Guides & how-tos
- How to convert MP3 to MIDI, step by step
- Why full-song audio to MIDI fails (isolate one part first)
- The best free audio-to-MIDI converters in 2026
- How to convert a Suno (AI) song to MIDI
- Samplab is shutting down — the best alternatives
- Audio to MIDI vs voice to MIDI — which do you need?
Working from an idea in your head instead of a recording? Voice to MIDI turns humming, singing, or beatboxing into notes on real cleared instruments.
