Recording or audio to sheet music: how it works and how to get a good draft

Three steps from sound to staff

Open Recording to Sheet Music. Record with your microphone for up to 30 seconds (or upload a WAV, MP3 or M4A file — the first 30 seconds are used). The audio is analysed in your browser and a melody draft appears on the staff. You can add or remove notes, then download PNG or PDF, or open more export options for WAV, MIDI or a backup file.

Record a clean melody

Sing or play one line at a time in a quiet room, close to the microphone, at a steady speed with clear note starts. A single voice or instrument gives far better results than a full mix. Hold each note long enough to be heard, avoid heavy vibrato and keep background noise low.

Melody, chords, drums and BPM

Melody is the default. In Advanced settings you can switch to a chord draft (per bar or half bar), a rhythm draft for kick, snare and hi-hat, and detect the BPM — it looks for repeating onsets between 60 and 180 BPM, so very slow or fast songs can come out at half or double speed. For stereo files the tool can also split rough layers (low, mid, high, vocal centre, vocals removed); a microphone take is mono and cannot be split into vocals.

Clean up the result

Treat the staff as a starting point. Listen to it, then fix wrong pitches, merge repeated notes and correct the rhythm. Export MIDI to continue in a music program, or save the draft into a song section in the Music Studio.

What it cannot do

It uses simple pitch, spectrum and volume rules, not AI transcription. Busy mixes, harmony, fast runs and drums are often wrong, and it will not match a professional transcription. Your microphone take stays in browser memory and is not uploaded or saved.

Tools used in this guide