ScoreCloud, described as ‘like Google Translate for music’, has been updated with polyphonic note transcription.
ScoreCloud 4 introduces polyphonic audio analysis. According to the developers, it lets you play polyphonically with any instrument and get the performance notated, without the need for any cables.
ScoreCloud is free for Mac & Windows from the developer’s site, but uses a fee-based model to unlock features like unlimited songs.
Wow! Awesome. Anybody have any experience with this? Does it actually work?
Interesting business model. From 5$/month for realtime notation to 20$/month for MusicXML notation from audio files. If it works as well as advertised (say, like Ceremony Melodyne polyphonic transcription, which is quite unique), there’s a lot to be said about subscribing for a month and getting a batch of scores done.
This is a really non-trivial problem, will be interesting to see how it works in practice as it’s a very useful offering.
That said, you can also hook up MIDI keyboard to your PC and transcribe directly into most DAWs.
As someone who has done a massive amount of transcribing in the past 20 years, I’ve worked out lots of ways of doing this work with very high accuracy. It is time-consuming work, to be sure.
I sometimes need adapt the reference track to hear parts more clearly. BTW, a recent plugin called Directional EQ from DDMF has been amazingly helpful (and VERY affordable)! I also pull from my years of experience with instrumental and orchestral techniques to infer parts that are difficult to hear.
Even if the transcription engine is imperfect (which it WILL BE), it could save some time to get a rough idea of parts down and edit/correct them, rather than entering them all from scratch in via MIDI. For me, it would not save much time, as I have gotten pretty efficient at it. But I would imagine for the types of processes shown in the trailer above- e.g., piano only, then vocal only– it would work pretty well. Sending it finished mixes would probably not be as squeaky-clean.