Turning Piano Audio into MIDI and Sheet Music

We've all been there. You sit at the piano, hit record on your phone, and improvise something you really like. Or maybe you stumble upon a brilliant piano cover on YouTube, but the creator hasn’t linked any sheet music.

Getting those notes from an audio file onto a page or into your DAW used to mean hours of tedious listening, pausing, guessing, and writing. That friction is exactly why we built Ivory. Today, AI can listen to a piano track and translate it into workable digital formats in minutes. But to get the most out of these tools, it helps to understand exactly what formats you're working with.

What exactly is MIDI?

If you’re new to digital music production, MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) can be a bit confusing because it isn’t actually audio. Think of it more like the paper roll in an old-school player piano. It doesn't record the sound of your instrument; it records the action.

When Ivory turns your MP3 or YouTube link into MIDI, it's extracting raw data about the performance:

• Pitch: Which exact keys were pressed.
• Velocity: How hard you hit the keys (capturing the expressive dynamics).
• Timing: The precise millisecond a note starts and stops.

Because it’s just data, MIDI is completely malleable. You can drop a MIDI file into software like Logic Pro, Ableton, or FL Studio, fix a wrong note, change the tempo without distorting the audio, or even assign the piano performance to sound like a synthesizer or a string section.

Making sense of it: The Sheet Music

MIDI is great for computers, but raw data is incredibly hard for a human to sight-read. That’s where traditional sheet music comes in.

Turning audio into a readable score is actually a much harder problem than just capturing the raw notes. The software has to understand the musical context. It has to calculate the time signature, figure out which notes belong to the left hand versus the right hand, detect the underlying chords, and crucially quantize the rhythms. If it didn't quantize, a slight human hesitation would show up as an unreadable mess of 64th notes.

Ivory handles this heavy lifting automatically, structuring the audio into a clean, legible score that you can read right off a tablet, or export as a PDF and MusicXML (the standard format for notation software like Sibelius or MuseScore).

How the transcription workflow actually works

We designed Ivory to be a workspace, not just a one-click converter. Here is how you use it to pull a piece apart and learn it:

• 1. Bring your audio You don't need a pristine studio recording. Drag and drop an MP3, WAV, or MP4 file (up to 15MB). If the performance is online, just paste the YouTube URL directly into the app and let the engine do the work.
• 2. Review and practice Once processed, Ivory opens an interactive web player. You aren't just staring at a static file. You can watch the notes fall on a piano roll, slow the tempo way down to figure out a fast run, or loop a specific section until your fingers get it right. You can even transpose the whole piece into a different key with one click.
• 3. Tweak the details AI transcription is incredibly powerful, but you might still want to make editorial choices. We built a familiar piano roll editor directly into the browser. If a note feels slightly off or you want to change a duration, you can drag, drop, resize, or delete notes instantly.
• 4. Export to your workflow Grab the exact format you need. Pull the MIDI into your DAW (we even have dedicated DAW plugins coming soon), grab the MusicXML for arranging, or just download the PDF for your music stand.

Stop letting good ideas disappear

Whether you're trying to learn an impossible chord progression, arranging a cover song, or just trying to archive your own midnight improvisations, getting the notes down shouldn't be a roadblock. Drop an audio file or a YouTube link into Ivory and see what it captures.