Check out Soundslice for exactly this. It's great audio/video playback (with slowdown, looping, etc.), with an integrated tab and sheet music editor. So you can write down what you've figured out, and it remains synced with the original audio.
Soundslice lets you start with a real recording (MP3 or YouTube) and integrates the audio/video playback directly with a tab/notation editor.
So as you play the audio (with slowdown, looping, etc.), you can immediately write down what you figured out, and that written notation stays synced with the original recording. This workflow for transcription is fantastic, because otherwise you're juggling multiple apps (audio playback/slowdown, plus notation software).
Since you asked about MuseScore: MuseScore is purely scoring software, without the ability to sync with real audio. You can also use Soundslice as a pure sheet music editor; the main difference is it's web-based as opposed to being a desktop app like MuseScore. Soundslice also has the philosophy that the music might always be displayed on different devices, so it's engraved on the fly depending on your screen dimensions. (MuseScore sort of assumes the end result will be a fixed-dimension such as paper.)
I'm curious how it works for videos that contain moving tab (as in, the playhead stays in the center while the tab moves behind it). Seems like that sort of tab wouldn't work with this approach...?
Kudos from one of the Soundslice guys — we've been making web-based tab and sheet music stuff since 2012. :)
I took Dave’s “Write a compiler” course several years ago, and it was mind-blowing in the absolute best sense of the term. What a great teacher and person.
Programmers are worse off for his retirement, but (given his career change) Chicago-area high school kids are in for a real treat.
I also make instrumental music, and I have this same problem. What I do is: find a word or phrase that matches the rhythmic phrasing of my main melody. That becomes the working title.
An example is how Paul McCartney’s original title for “Yesterday” was “Scrambled Eggs,” since those words fit naturally over the start of the melody.
I'm a very happy Google Closure Compiler user, especially with the "advanced optimizations" flag. It does a level of code elimination and variable renaming at a level that no other JavaScript tool even approaches. Excellent software.
I think it gets a bad rap because you need to write your code in a certain way to avoid the optimizations breaking things. But if you're a disciplined developer, you'll reap some large benefits.
I've been working on it full-time since 2012, so it's hard for me to reduce 14 years' worth of work to a single "most difficult technical step."
Sorry, I don't mean to be rude or unhelpful, but that's not a question I can provide a meaningful answer to. There have been dozens, probably hundreds, of difficult technical challenges in building Soundslice.
I’ve transcribed hundreds of hours of guitar music over 25+ years, using the method described in this article. It was such a slog that I ended up creating tool to help streamline the process: Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/).
It combines audio playback directly with a tab editor, so that you can immediately write down what you’ve figured out and your transcription stays in sync with the original audio. This makes transcribing incredibly fast and (importantly) accurate.
It’s got audio slowdown, precise looping, “synth overlay” (playback of the transcription and original audio at the same time, to spot errors), auto stem separation and a full-featured tab/notation editor with support for hundreds of notations.
When you’re done, you get a very useful artifact: a synced transcription, effectively a bespoke practice environment for that piece of music.
Over the years, Soundslice has expanded into a lot more than a pure transcription tool, but lots of people still use it for its original intended purpose. (It supports any instrument that uses western music notation, not just guitar.) If you’re at all interested in transcribing music, give it a shot.
Hi, I make that site! We don't have any "basic effects like normalization/compression," so I think you may be mistaking us for something else?
Soundslice is oriented around sheet music that's synced with audio. So while we have a few audio-processing features (basic cropping, slowdown and fine-grained pitch correction), that stuff is all secondary to the notation aspect.
Thanks for sharing this. Your site is great. I've already learned a bunch of stuff, just browsing around the existing submissions.
I had a chuckle pondering whether you A/B tested "really freaking cool-looking" versus "really cool-looking" in the prompt. What a weird world we live in! :-)
Interpreting sheet music images is very complex, and I’m not surprised general-purpose LLMs totally fail at it. It’s orders of magnitude harder than text OCR, due to the two-dimensional-ness.
Definitely a subtle distinction there. Soundslice supports tab in many formats (MusicXML, Guitar Pro, PowerTab, TuxGuitar, PDF/images of published tab, or tab notated directly in the Soundslice editor) but didn't support ASCII format yet.
Yes, Soundslice has a ton of tab-first users. And in fact the primary reason I founded the site was to scratch my own itch of being able to create tab that's synced with real audio recordings. (I'm a guitarist myself.)
Co-creator of Django: http://www.djangoproject.com/
Working on Soundslice (interactive sheet music/tablature, "the Internet's finest music learning experience"): http://www.soundslice.com/
Founded EveryBlock (neighborhood news and discussion, now defunct)
Made http://www.chicagocrime.org/ (one of the original Google Maps mashups, now defunct)
Listen to my album of 10 original guitar tunes: https://www.holovaty.com/melodic-guitar-music/
And the follow-up EP: https://www.holovaty.com/layer-cake/
Guitar videos: http://youtube.com/adrianholovaty