A free, open-source music transcription tool for macOS — built as an alternative to Transcribe!.
"If I stop practice for one day, I notice it; two days, my friends notice it; three days, the public notices it." — Hans von Bülow (1877)
- Audio to MIDI —
Analyze → Transcribe Track to MIDI…(⇧⌘M) transcribes the loaded track with Spotify Basic Pitch and overlays detected notes on its waveform. Separated stems also offer “Transcribe to MIDI…” in their context menu. Pitched instruments work best; dense mixes and percussion may produce inaccurate notes. - Waveform visualizer — see the full audio waveform at a glance
- Mouse-driven loop selection — drag to select any region, press Escape to clear
- Pitch-preserving speed control — slow down to 0.25× without changing the pitch
- Pitch shifting — transpose ±12 semitones independently of speed
- Broad format support — MP3, WAV, FLAC, AIFF, M4A / AAC
- Media URL import — paste a URL (
File → Import Media URL…, ⇧⌘O) and the audio is downloaded and loaded into the editor - Sheet music panel — open a PDF or image with
File → Open Sheet Music…to read beside the waveform; zoom, fit the page, and reopen the same sheet when returning to a song. - iReal chord library —
File → Browse iReal Library…searches the popular iReal playlists and opens a selected chart beside the audio. Includes Jazz, Brazilian, Latin, Blues, Pop and Country collections, with source links and an Update Lists button.
- macOS 13 Ventura or later
- Xcode Command Line Tools (clang, Metal toolchain)
Grab the latest .zip from the Releases page, unzip, and move OpenScribeNative.app to your Applications folder.
First launch: right-click → Open to bypass the Gatekeeper warning (the app is not yet notarized).
Prerequisites: Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install)
git clone https://github.com/yalindogusahin/openscribe.git
cd openscribe
bash cpp/build.sh 1.0.0
bash cpp/bundle_helper.sh # first build: bundle Python, ML dependencies and models
open cpp/OpenScribeNative.appNative macOS app written in C++/Objective-C++ (Cocoa + AVFoundation + Metal).
| Layer | Files | Responsibility |
|---|---|---|
| App | main.mm, AppDelegate.mm |
Entry point, lifecycle |
| Audio | AudioEngine.mm |
AVFoundation pipeline, looping, time/pitch |
| Views | MainWindow.mm, WaveformView.mm, TimelineRulerView.mm |
Cocoa + Metal-rendered waveform |
| Settings | SettingsWindowController.mm |
Output device picker, prefs |
The audio pipeline uses AVAudioPlayerNode → AVAudioUnitTimePitch → mainMixerNode → output. AVAudioUnitTimePitch handles both speed (rate) and pitch (pitch in cents) natively. The waveform is rendered with a Metal shader (WaveformShaders.metal) for smooth zoom at any scale.
Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.