Transcribe!

About

Transcribe! is a Mac assistant for working out a piece of music from a recording so you can write it out, play it yourself, or both. It does not transcribe automatically. Instead, it works as a player optimised for transcription, with features that conventional music players lack. It can display the audio as a scrollable waveform, place markers for sections, measures, and beats with named labels and text annotations, and play or loop from any point. It can also change pitch and speed instantly, store and recall named loops, and slow music down without changing its pitch.

Transcribe! also supports play-along practice and speech transcription. Its chord analysis shows which notes are present, though you still need your own ear to judge which spectrum peaks are played notes, harmonics, or noise. A piano keyboard on screen lets you click to play reference notes. Foot pedals and a rich set of keyboard shortcuts let you control playback hands-free, and the program can display video for most video files. It reads many audio file types and audio CDs, and it can record from analog sources. It is not an audio editor, though it can apply effects such as speed change, pitch change, and EQ, and save the result to a new sound file.

Transcribe! is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can download it and use it free for a 30-day evaluation period, after which you must buy it to continue using it. It does not handle MIDI files, which already contain note information.