Song to MIDI with a track per instrument

Part of our multi-instrument transcription guide.

The short answer: to convert a song to MIDI with every instrument on its own track, upload it to Songscription and choose Multi-Instrument. It listens to the full mix once and writes a MIDI file with a separate track for each instrument, plus a multi-staff score of the same parts, edited and engraved in its own score editor. In our October 2026 benchmark its multi-instrument MIDI scored 52.2, ahead of every tool we tested.

Songscription is our product. We put it first where it’s the right tool, and we say plainly where another tool fits better.

Why most converters give you one track

Hearing several notes at once is one problem. Knowing which instrument played each one is another. Most audio-to-MIDI converters solve the first and skip the second, so a song comes back as a single track where the bass line, the piano chords and the string pad are mixed together. You then spend an hour in the piano roll pulling them apart by ear.

A multitrack converter has to recognize instruments as well as notes. That’s what Multi-Instrument does: it writes keys, guitars, bass, strings, brass, woodwinds, saxophones, synths and voice each to their own part. Multitrack MIDI vs stems explains why notes on separate tracks beat separated audio for production.

How the converters compare

Multi-instrument scores from our October 2026 benchmark, on full recordings with several instruments:

Our benchmark write-up explains how each score is measured.

How to convert a song to multitrack MIDI

1. Bring the song in. Upload an audio file (MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, M4A) or a video, paste a YouTube, TikTok or Instagram link, or record in the browser.
2. Choose Multi-Instrument. It writes every part it hears in one pass.
3. Check the parts. The score opens in the score editor with a staff per instrument and the piano roll below it. Play it back, fix a wrong note, or ask Annie, the AI score assistant, to make the change. Keyboard parts come split into left and right hand.
4. Rerun the part that matters most. Single-instrument mode isolates one instrument from the full mix and ignores everything else, for the cleanest version of that line.
5. Export the MIDI. Choose score-derived MIDI, which follows the written score and your fixes, or raw transcription MIDI, which keeps the performance’s own timing and velocities for you to quantize as you like. Exports come with Plus and Pro.

Then drag the file into your DAW and give each track a sound. Our guides for Ableton Live, Logic Pro and FL Studio and GarageBand walk through each one, and how to recreate a song in your DAW covers the full producer workflow.

What works best

• Bands and worship teams: keys, guitars, bass, vocals, and any horns or strings.
• Jazz combos: piano, bass, sax and trumpet. Our guide to transcribing a jazz combo goes further.
• String quartets and chamber groups.
• Film and game cues with strings and brass. See orchestral arrangement to MIDI.

Where to expect cleanup: the more instruments overlap in the same range, the more checking a part needs. Dense full-orchestra mixes are the hardest case, and a choir comes back as one voice track, not separate soprano, alto, tenor and bass parts.

The other routes

• Basic Pitch and other single-track converters: free, but the whole song lands on one track with no instrument labels, and there’s no score.
• Stem splitters, then a converter per stem: Moises and Demucs separate audio, not notes, so you run a converter on each stem and line the files up yourself. It adds steps, and any artifacts from the split carry into the conversion.
• Your DAW’s built-in conversion: Ableton Live 12 converts audio to MIDI per clip, and Logic makes MIDI from Flex Pitch, which is monophonic only. Neither recognizes instruments in a full mix.
• Klangio: a subscription suite of separate apps that trailed Songscription on both multi-instrument scores in our benchmark. Where it has something we don’t: a DAW plugin and a public API.

Try it

Upload a song to audio to multitrack MIDI and you get the score and the MIDI from the same pass. Our roundup of the best multi-instrument transcription software compares the tools in more depth.