adrianh

Kudos from a person who's also built an OMR engine - the one at Soundslice, which is in my biased opinion the best one. :)

Check out Soundslice for exactly this. It's great audio/video playback (with slowdown, looping, etc.), with an integrated tab and sheet music editor. So you can write down what you've figured out, and it remains synced with the original audio.

Soundslice lets you start with a real recording (MP3 or YouTube) and integrates the audio/video playback directly with a tab/notation editor.

So as you play the audio (with slowdown, looping, etc.), you can immediately write down what you figured out, and that written notation stays synced with the original recording. This workflow for transcription is fantastic, because otherwise you're juggling multiple apps (audio playback/slowdown, plus notation software).

Since you asked about MuseScore: MuseScore is purely scoring software, without the ability to sync with real audio. You can also use Soundslice as a pure sheet music editor; the main difference is it's web-based as opposed to being a desktop app like MuseScore. Soundslice also has the philosophy that the music might always be displayed on different devices, so it's engraved on the fly depending on your screen dimensions. (MuseScore sort of assumes the end result will be a fixed-dimension such as paper.)

Hey, great to hear! Thanks for taking the time to write that. :) Keep transcribing and playing music!

I'm curious how it works for videos that contain moving tab (as in, the playhead stays in the center while the tab moves behind it). Seems like that sort of tab wouldn't work with this approach...?

Kudos from one of the Soundslice guys — we've been making web-based tab and sheet music stuff since 2012. :)

I took Dave’s “Write a compiler” course several years ago, and it was mind-blowing in the absolute best sense of the term. What a great teacher and person.

Programmers are worse off for his retirement, but (given his career change) Chicago-area high school kids are in for a real treat.

I also make instrumental music, and I have this same problem. What I do is: find a word or phrase that matches the rhythmic phrasing of my main melody. That becomes the working title.

An example is how Paul McCartney’s original title for “Yesterday” was “Scrambled Eggs,” since those words fit naturally over the start of the melody.

I'm a very happy Google Closure Compiler user, especially with the "advanced optimizations" flag. It does a level of code elimination and variable renaming at a level that no other JavaScript tool even approaches. Excellent software.

I think it gets a bad rap because you need to write your code in a certain way to avoid the optimizations breaking things. But if you're a disciplined developer, you'll reap some large benefits.

Yes, Drumeo embeds the Soundslice player within its product. :)

Great to hear. Thanks very much, and keep playing music!

You're very welcome, and thanks for using it!

I've been working on it full-time since 2012, so it's hard for me to reduce 14 years' worth of work to a single "most difficult technical step."

Sorry, I don't mean to be rude or unhelpful, but that's not a question I can provide a meaningful answer to. There have been dozens, probably hundreds, of difficult technical challenges in building Soundslice.