CadenzaTranscribe · included with Everything
Drop in a song. Get the chord chart.
Transcribe reads an audio file you already have, finds the beat, the bars, the key and the form, and writes the chords as a chart you can play from. The chords it is unsure of are marked, and every one you correct makes the rest of the song easier to read.
A first draft, untouched. Our own two-minute piano demo, dropped in as an MP3. The sections, the bar lines, the key and the tempo are Transcribe’s; so is every chord — including the D in bar 3, which should be Dm7 and is marked with a ? for exactly that reason.
From a file to a chart in four steps.
- Drop a file. MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, FLAC, OGG or Opus, up to fifteen minutes. It never leaves your computer: the analysis runs locally and nothing is uploaded.
- Read the draft. Beat, bar lines, meter, key and tempo, the song’s sections — intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus — and the chords, bar by bar. Anything it is unsure of carries a ? and waits in the review list.
- Fix what is wrong. Enter, type the chord, Enter. Or press 1–9 for one of the readings it considered. Split a bar, merge two, move a bar line, lock what you are sure of.
- Let it listen again. “Re-analyse with my edits” reads the song a second time with your corrections held fixed — and the chords around them tend to fall into place.
Correcting bar 3: Enter, “Dm7”, Enter. The readings it considered are listed under the field, one key each.
Take it anywhere
A chart is only useful where you play.
Print it as a PDF chart, save it as ChordPro for the apps that read it, as plain text, or as MusicXML chord symbols for MuseScore, Sibelius or Dorico. Or open it in the Recorder, where the chart becomes a lead sheet with the song’s own bar lines — and you play the melody into it.
Seven ways out. The corrected bar 3 now reads Dm7, and the review list is one item shorter.
What it is — and what it is not
It writes chords, not notes: no melody line, no piano part. For the notes, play the song into the Recorder. It writes a first draft: clear piano, guitar and band recordings come out mostly right, while dense mixes, heavy distortion and songs that change chord every beat leave more for you to correct — which is what the review list and the second listen are for. If you already have separated stems from another tool, drop them on the open song and it reads the bass and the harmony instead of the full mix. And it reads files you already have: there is no box for a YouTube link, on purpose. It does not download anything, from anywhere.
Transcribe comes with Everything.
One payment of €69: the Recorder, the Grips course, the full live window and Transcribe, with every update. It is not sold on its own. Everything is unlocked for the first three days — try it on your own songs before you decide.
macOS 12 or later · Windows 10 and 11 · 14-day refund · no subscription