Pianolyze
See inside your favorite songs and learn how they work
127 followers
See inside your favorite songs and learn how they work
127 followers
Pianolyze helps you figure out what’s happening in your favorite music. Upload a recording to separate the instruments and see their notes on an interactive piano roll. Isolate a bass line, slow down and loop a tricky passage, or mute a part and play along. Select a section to ask AI about its chords, rhythm, or how the parts fit together. Export the transcription as MIDI to keep working in your DAW or notation software.
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I'm Nick. As a pianist, I've always been interested in understanding how the greats do what they do – sometimes to the point of obsession. How do they voice lead through changes? What's actually happening under their hands?
Back in 2022, I built Harmonic Analyzer – a Mac app that transcribed piano recordings using ML. It got some traction, but I never quite finished it. Requiring users to download a Mac app felt like unnecessary friction, and I didn’t want to limit distribution to Mac users.
Thankfully, technology has evolved, enabling me to ship a web-based version, which I've called Pianolyze.
The entire stack runs client-side:
• ONNX Runtime hosting Bytedance's piano transcription model
• Web Workers for async transcription processing, exposed via Comlink
• WebGL for piano roll rendering
• Web Audio API for playback
• IndexedDB for model caching
• React + Vite + MobX State Tree
Your audio never leaves your device. No servers, no uploads, no inference bills.
Watch the video above to see it in action, transcribing the playing of the late, brilliant Mulgrew Miller, who I was fortunate to study with briefly as a teenager.
Try it with your favorite piano recordings – solo works best, and you'll be amazed at what it picks up. Would love to hear what you think, and happy to answer any questions! 🎹
@nickplee Learning to play piano has been on my wish list for long, bookmarked this!
@nickplee This is really cool. I just put in Keith Jarrett's Autumn Leaves from Tokyo 96. Is there some way you could have this output a transcript in standard notation? I know it's really difficult with the rhythm and everything, but even just the notes in standard notation, even if the timing isn't right, would be a lot easier for me to read.
Oh here's a random idea: what if you could drag to highlight a section of the timeline, and that outputs the notes in Western notation?
@rajiv_ayyangar Amazing, and thank you! It's very hard to choose, but Tokyo '96 is probably my favorite Standards Trio record. Keith's intro on "It Could Happen to You" is absolutely sublime.
That's a great idea, even if it just showed the currently active notes on a grand staff or something. Let me see what I can do!
Congrats on the launch! I recently went to Jacob Collier’s concert, his harmonies are insane! Do you think it’ll soon be possible to just drop YouTube link and get a transcribed version on a piano roll?
@sergey_demyanov That's a great idea for a feature. I'll investigate.
Would also be good if you had a demo mini on the home page of the site, for us folks who dont have music files.
Do you plan to create this tool for more musical instruments? :)
@busmark_w_nika it's on my roadmap to explore, though I think it is of less utility for non-chordal instruments, since it is easier to hear what's going on. Thanks for checking my app out.
Client-side transcription is tricky. What’s your approach for keeping it performant?
This is brilliant, Nick — client-side transcription and privacy-first? That’s the dream. Excited to test it out! 👏
I couldn't find where to view the sheet music. Will you be able to do it later?