A free, open-source music transcription tool for macOS — built as an alternative to Transcribe!.
"If I stop practice for one day, I notice it; two days, my friends notice it; three days, the public notices it." — Hans von Bülow (1877)
- Waveform visualizer — see the full audio waveform at a glance
- Mouse-driven loop selection — drag to select any region, press Escape to clear
- Pitch-preserving speed control — slow down to 0.25× without changing the pitch
- Pitch shifting — transpose ±12 semitones independently of speed
- Broad format support — MP3, WAV, FLAC, AIFF, M4A / AAC
- macOS 13 Ventura or later
- Xcode Command Line Tools (clang, Metal toolchain)
Grab the latest .zip from the Releases page, unzip, and move OpenScribeNative.app to your Applications folder.
First launch: right-click → Open to bypass the Gatekeeper warning (the app is not yet notarized).
Prerequisites: Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install)
git clone https://github.com/yalindogusahin/openscribe.git
cd openscribe
bash cpp/build.sh 1.0.0
open cpp/OpenScribeNative.appNative macOS app written in C++/Objective-C++ (Cocoa + AVFoundation + Metal).
| Layer | Files | Responsibility |
|---|---|---|
| App | main.mm, AppDelegate.mm |
Entry point, lifecycle |
| Audio | AudioEngine.mm |
AVFoundation pipeline, looping, time/pitch |
| Views | MainWindow.mm, WaveformView.mm, TimelineRulerView.mm |
Cocoa + Metal-rendered waveform |
| Settings | SettingsWindowController.mm |
Output device picker, prefs |
The audio pipeline uses AVAudioPlayerNode → AVAudioUnitTimePitch → mainMixerNode → output. AVAudioUnitTimePitch handles both speed (rate) and pitch (pitch in cents) natively. The waveform is rendered with a Metal shader (WaveformShaders.metal) for smooth zoom at any scale.
Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.