Play Anything Engineering Team · October 2026

A new state of the art in music transcription: Songscription by

We tested Songscription by Play Anything against three commercial products and five open-source models on two tasks: transcribing full-length recordings into MIDI and sheet music, and arranging songs for piano. Songscription came first across the board, and our sheet music was the most accurate and needed the fewest corrections. In blind side-by-side tests on real-world songs, listeners clearly preferred Songscription's piano arrangements.

More accurate notes and cleaner scores

The most accurate MIDI and the most accurate sheet music, for solo piano and for multi-instrument music.

MIDI accuracy: the average of three standard transcription scores computed with mir_eval: notes found at the right pitch and start time (onset F1), notes that also end at the right time (onset-offset F1), and the right notes sounding at each moment (frame F1). Sheet-music accuracy: the average of two scores: the share of notes that are right in pitch, rhythm, length and voice (MUSTER), and how little of the written score needs editing to match the real one (OMR-NED). For multi-instrument music, MIDI is measured on 200 recordings and sheet music on 28 professional transcriptions.

Hear the difference for yourself

Press play, then tap a name to compare what each one wrote for the same passage.

The recordings are representative performances. Each system's sheet music was made from the benchmark's own recording of the piece.

Songscription also has the best model for piano arrangements

Piano players often can't use transcriptions to figure out what to play. For that, Songscription by Play Anything offers Arrangement. It rewrites the song for two hands, keeping its melody and chords, at the difficulty level you choose.

We compared it with Klang.io's Melody Scanner and the open-source Pop2Piano and Etude.

Questions