BasicPitchDemo

BasicPitchDemo

Sample iOS app for spotify/basic-pitch — polyphonic Automatic Music Transcription. Converts any audio (any instrument, any voice) into MIDI notes with pitch bend detection. Just 17 K parameters / 272 KB — runs in real time on iPhone with full ANE acceleration.

The first open-source iOS implementation. Loads any audio file, runs the CoreML model in 2-second sliding windows, then runs the full Python note_creation.py pipeline natively in Swift (onset inference, greedy backwards-in-time tracking, melodia trick, pitch bend extraction). Detected notes are visualised as a piano roll, exported as a Standard MIDI File, and played back through a built-in additive sine synth so you can A/B compare with the original audio.

ScreenRecording_04-08-2026.02-14-51_1.mov

Models

Model	Size	Input	Output
BasicPitch_nmp.mlpackage.zip	272 KB	audio waveform [1, 43844, 1] @ 22050 Hz mono	note [1, 172, 88] + onset [1, 172, 88] + contour [1, 172, 264]

Setup

1. Download the .mlpackage.zip above
2. Unzip and drag the .mlpackage into the Xcode project
3. Build and run on a physical device (iOS 17+)

Pipeline

audio file ──→ AVAudioFile decode ──→ peak-normalize to 0.98 ──→ resample to 22050 Hz mono
                                                                           │
                                                          2-second sliding windows
                                                                           │
                                                                       BasicPitch
                                                                           │
                                                          (note, onset, contour)
                                                                           │
                                                              note_creation pipeline (Swift)
                                                                           │
                                                       MIDI notes + pitch bends
                                                                           │
                                                       piano-roll visual + .mid export + sine synth playback

Implementation Notes (iOS-specific)

• MLMultiArray strides matter on ANE. The Neural Engine returns the (1, 172, 88) output with stride [16512, 96, 1] — rows are padded from 88 to 96 columns for alignment. Reading dataPointer linearly gives garbage; use array.strides to skip the padding.
• MP3 decoder mismatch. iOS Core Audio's MP3 decoder produces ~7% louder samples than librosa (sometimes exceeding ±1.0). The same MP3 fed to Python and to the iOS app yields different note detections from the same model. Fix: peak-normalise the loaded audio to 0.98 with vDSP_maxmgv before windowing.
• Algorithm port is exact. Onset inference uses element-wise min across diff orders, the greedy tracker uses Python's i -= k rollback with i < n_frames - 1 boundary, the melodia trick zeroes energy in-place during forward/backward passes including the ± 1 freq neighbours. With matching audio input the Swift output matches the Python reference note-for-note.

A deeper dive into the post-processing port (greedy tracker rollback, melodia trick in-place zeroing, min_note_len boundary conditions) is in docs/coreml_conversion_notes.md.