FLAC to MIDI Converter Online
Turn lossless FLAC recordings, stems, or archive tracks into editable MIDI notes. MelodyTrace normalizes the FLAC input, transcribes its audio, and gives you a piano-roll result to review.
- FLAC
- Lossless compressed audio
- Editable MIDI
Click a note to hear it
How it works
Upload FLAC
Choose lossless FLAC recordings, stems, or archive tracks up to 50 MB and 10 minutes. Lossless compressed audio
Review the transcription
Play the detected notes on the piano roll, compare them with the source, and adjust sensitivity, minimum note length, or pitch bends when needed.
Edit and download MIDI
Download the result immediately, or sign in to correct notes and export notation for the next step in your music workflow.
Formats & limits
- Input formats
- FLAC
- Output
- MIDI (.mid)
- File limits
- 50 MB · 10 min
- Price
- Free · no sign-up
Preparing FLAC for a cleaner MIDI result
- Start from the isolated FLAC stem rather than the full master when your archive contains both.
- A clear single melody, vocal, or instrument line usually needs less cleanup than a dense finished mix.
- Trim long silence and unrelated sections before uploading so the transcription focuses on the passage you need.
- Lossless encoding preserves detail, but dense harmony still requires manual cleanup after transcription.
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert FLAC to MIDI?
Upload the FLAC file — lossless FLAC recordings, stems, or archive tracks all work — and it's normalized and sent through the same Basic Pitch transcription engine used for every audio source on this site; there is no separate FLAC-specific model, so the file format itself has no bearing on transcription quality, only on how the audio decodes going in. The result lands on an interactive piano roll where you can play it back against the source, adjust detection sensitivity or minimum note length, and re-transcribe without uploading the file again if the first pass needs tuning. Once it looks right, download the generated .mid file directly with no account required at all, or sign in first to unlock full note editing plus exporting the result as MusicXML or PDF sheet music alongside the plain MIDI download.
Does converting FLAC preserve the original sound?
No — and that's expected, not a limitation of this specific tool. MIDI stores detected notes, timing, and velocity rather than the original waveform, timbre, or instrument sound, so converting FLAC to MIDI necessarily discards the audio itself, the same way any audio-to-MIDI transcription does regardless of source format or how lossless it is. What you get back instead is a performance you can replay with any instrument sound of your choosing, edit note by note on the piano roll, transpose to a different key, or hand off to a DAW as a fully editable track — that trade-off, exchanging the fixed original sound for flexible, editable note data, is precisely what makes MIDI useful in the first place, rather than functioning as just another audio copy in a different container.
What FLAC files work best?
Start from the isolated FLAC stem rather than the full master when your archive contains both. Lossless encoding preserves detail, but dense harmony still requires manual cleanup after transcription. Beyond those format-specific points, the same rule applies as for any source: a single clear melody or solo instrument transcribes far more accurately than a dense mix, since the underlying transcription model was evaluated on isolated, largely monophonic material rather than multiple instruments layered together in a full production. If a first attempt comes back with noticeably more wrong or extra notes than you expected, that's usually a sign the source has more going on musically than a solo line — try isolating just the part you actually need, either by re-recording it alone, muting other tracks before bouncing a mix down, or using a separate stem-splitting tool first, then re-upload that isolated part instead of the full mix.
What are the upload limits?
Each file can be up to 50 MB and roughly 10 minutes long, a ceiling that comfortably covers the vast majority of recordings and stems people upload here without needing to trim anything first, since most individual songs, practice takes, or short clips fall well under both limits. Short, focused passages finish transcribing sooner and are noticeably easier to verify against the original on the piano roll afterward, simply because there's less material to scroll through and compare note by note before you trust the result. If your source runs longer than that ceiling, cutting it down to the specific section you actually need — rather than uploading the full file and discarding most of the transcribed result afterward — is usually both the faster and the more accurate path, since trimming also removes whatever unrelated audio elsewhere in the file might otherwise confuse the transcription.
Does the FLAC compression level affect transcription accuracy?
No. FLAC is lossless at every compression setting from 0 to 8 — those levels only trade encoding time and resulting file size against each other, never audio fidelity, since lossless compression by definition has to reconstruct the exact original samples on decode. A FLAC file decodes to bit-identical PCM audio regardless of which level produced it, whether it was encoded for speed at level 0 or maximum size reduction at level 8, so the transcription model sees exactly the same waveform either way and produces the same result. If you're re-encoding an archive to save space, feel free to use the highest compression level without any transcription-quality trade-off — the only cost is longer encoding time.
Is FLAC actually more accurate than WAV or MP3 for transcription?
FLAC and WAV transcribe identically, since FLAC decodes losslessly back to exactly the same PCM data that WAV stores directly and uncompressed — there is no fidelity difference left for the transcription model to pick up on between the two, so choosing one over the other is purely a matter of file size and convenience, not accuracy. Where FLAC (or WAV) does have a real, measurable edge is over MP3: MP3's lossy compression permanently discards some audio detail to shrink the file, and at lower bitrates that lost detail can be exactly the kind of fine pitch and timing information the transcription model relies on. So whenever you have a choice of source file, FLAC or WAV is preferable to MP3, but FLAC versus WAV makes no difference at all.