Digital Ear

Digital Ear is a compact Windows application designed specifically for helping you analyze the contents of WAV audio files and convert the audio streams to MIDI file format, while offering support for both recordings and live music.

User interface

The GUI doesn’t impress much in the visual department but it’s actually practical and gives you the possibility to alter several audio parameters right from the main window, such as octave, fine tuning, volume and brightness.

Built-in configuration wizard

As soon as you upload a custom WAV file in the working environment, the utility reveals a configuration wizard that is able to automatically set up the instrument’s range, harmonic threshold, optimal time resolution and brightness gain.

Adjusting several audio parameters

Digital Ear gives you the possibility to check out the graphical display of voice features, transpose the whole sequence in order to be center-tuned, undo your last action, quantize the whole sequence into the nearest semitone value, and automatically correct most of the errors that may have appeared during the recognition process.
What’s more, you are allowed to precisely transpose and/or change the tempo of the whole melody, turn on the Attack Detector feature (smart recognition of the notes’ onsets), select the output MIDI device, as well as play, pause or stop the current selection, adjust the volume, and seek for a position in the audio streams.
The conversion process can be carried out in real time, and you may adjust the microphone gain, quantization, transpose (semitones) and Smart Attack Detector.

General configuration settings

Digital Ear lets you tweak the harmonic threshold (by starting from zero and gradually moving upwards until errors are removed) and time resolution (in order to send the voice-specific features to the synthesizer at a speed of up to one hundred times per second).
In addition, you may increase the pitch and time resolution, select a range of notes, as well as modify the brightness gain and BPM. You can export different configuration files for various types of songs and save them on your computer so you can upload them in your future projects.

Bottom line

There’s no doubt Digital Ear comes with a powerful set of features for helping you analyze a recorded monophonic performance and convert it to a standard MIDI file but the application hasn’t been updated for a long time, so it is quite buggy on newer operating systems (we’ve tested it on Windows 8.1 and experienced several errors while trying to access its functions; at one point the mouse cursor disappeared from the main panel). In conclusion, you make use of this program’s capabilities if you run it on old operating systems.