Basic Pitch

Spotify's Audio Intelligence Lab designed Basic Pitch to make automatic music transcription trivially cheap: the instrument-agnostic model converts audio to MIDI with pitch bend detection using a neural network small and fast enough to run on CPU, and the research behind it was published at ICASSP 2022. It handles polyphonic and multipitch material across instruments including voice and guitar, and writes standard MIDI files ready for any DAW. The Python package installs with pip install basic-pitch on macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu, needs no GPU, and ships the model in TensorFlow, CoreML, TensorFlow Lite, and ONNX formats, defaulting to the best option per platform; a sibling TypeScript port runs the same model in the browser, powering the free hosted demo at basicpitch.spotify.com. Both a command line tool and a Python API are included. Apache-2.0 licensing covers the code and model, so commercial products can embed it. With about 5,400 GitHub stars, it has become the default open tool musicians and music information retrieval researchers reach for when recorded audio needs to become editable notes.