u/BatchModeBob

These are names AI gave me for a practice I encountered today. I did a google search for "audio to midi". It looks like google is easily duped these days. One person's product showed up under 5 different top level domain names. For another person's product, 6. The duplicated pages appearing under different top level domain names have cosmetic differences only. It's creepy comparing the cloned sites. Clearly AI was told to change a few words and colors. Testing confirms the output is identical.

This sure seems shady to me. All the domains are less than 2 years old with hidden owners. With my particular test case, two different completely free and open source non-saas locally executed solutions produce superior results. I suppose the average person trusts google a little too much. On the other hand, I am confident none of these services making any money. To be fair, google does list some legitimate services ahead of the cloned domains.

How common is this practice of domain cloning to multiply google search hits?

I have no interest in saas. I am a retired engineer who wrote a free and open source audio to midi converter as a retirement hobby and periodically benchmark my solution to the alternatives.

Decompress then navigate to demo\tuner and click bFlatTrumpet.bat.

It has fast response yet less flicker than some other tuner apps.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ctune/

Audio to midi solutions have a bigger hype to performance ratio than any audio technology I can think of. All of the demos obscure flaws by either mixing the source audio with the midi play back, defaulting the midi instrument to piano with lots of sustain to hide detail, or by producing audio full of overwhelming reverb. Sounds so musical for a couple of seconds.

By targeting only solo wind instruments, this app is able to outperform all other audio to midi converters. Of course, few if any people actually want a midi conversion app that's limited to solo wind instruments.

The app builds 100% from the included C code. No C++. No DSP or pitch detection libraries. No FFT (uses IIR filter bank). No single precision. Filter bank is fully vectorized and multithreaded. Reads most popular audio formats.

Bad stuff:
Requires Windows. Won't run on Apple. Won't run on phones. Won't do drums. Midi conversion is a command line operation.

The download includes all the C language source code. Builds with Visual Studio. No extra libraries are required. Statically linked single executable is included and runs stand-alone. No support DLLs required. 33 wind instrument flac input files are included, along with the corresponding midi output files. Even if you don't have a Windows PC, you can listen to the conversion results. All of the input audio is from youtube.

The 33 sample conversions include:

4 clarinet
17 oboe
2 tuba
2 trumpet
2 flute
1 piccolo
5 sax

But is it multiphonic you ask? I roll my eyes when people get so focused on multiphonic before their app can even properly decode the first phrase of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Yes, it's definitely multiphonic. But multiphonic operation is mostly off by default. Command line option minpowergain(here) turns it on. With some additional command line options, it can pick up 4 notes of a 6 string guitar strum. One of the multiphonic limitations is that it merges harmonics belonging to the same note at 2 different octaves.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ctune/