Convert drum stems to midi?

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So I just today found out the Split to Stems feature exists. It's absolute witchcraft as far as I'm concerned :)

Now I'm wondering if Waveform has the ability to convert a drum stem into MIDI so I can load it in notation software as a transcription?

This will make my life way easier trying to learn to play drums to some of the bands I listen to :)

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I never worked with it and am not sure if being helpful for what you are after, but have a look at the Groove Doctor for extracting the groove from the drum STEM. I guess that the result appears as a Groove template with the name you gave to it during analysis. Besides the detected gradients being displayed on the screen, the template can be applied to a Step Clip from within the control Panel calling for the Step Clip the created groove template.

Would be interesting to hear if you could find out if something like this would indeed work.
Classical guitar --> Line Audio CM4 @ SSL12 --> KDE-Plasma @ Debian-Linux --> Waveform PRO 13.5

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WF dosnt support Audio to MIDI conversion natively, unlike some other DAWS.

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Thanks for the replies, I'll have a look at Groove Doctor but I suspect it will be probably more productive for me to just use midi and step clips the way I normally program drums, and just do them in line with the stem.

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Check out the free version of Cakewalk Sonar. I think it will do what you want for the conversion - https://www.cakewalk.com/sonar

Melodyne Essential can also do it with monophonic material - https://www.celemony.com/en/melodyne

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Cheers, I have the old Bandlab version, so an upgrade probably won't hurt :)

I like some of the VSTs that come with Cakewalk

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There's a free plugin called NeuralNote that converts audio to midi with drag and drop features
Check it out at https://github.com/DamRsn/NeuralNote

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DavidPardy wrote: Sat Feb 21, 2026 2:00 am Cheers, I have the old Bandlab version, so an upgrade probably won't hurt :)

I like some of the VSTs that come with Cakewalk
Yes, they have some good ones, and it's nice you can use many of them with other DAWs (hey, I'm in Tracktion's forum :wink:).

I'd be interested to hear about your results, if you care to share them here.

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edrickblade wrote: Sat Feb 21, 2026 6:45 pm There's a free plugin called NeuralNote that converts audio to midi with drag and drop features
Check it out at https://github.com/DamRsn/NeuralNote (https://github.com/DamRsn/NeuralNote)
Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I can't get NeuralNote to recognize bass drum hits as MIDI. Has anyone here gotten this to work?

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It does say in the notes "works on any tonal instrument, including voice". If it doesn't detect a pitch before it decays, it may not get recognized properly - but toms might ?
Waveform 13; Win10 desktop/8 Gig; Win11 Laptop; MPK261; VFX+disfunctional ESQ-1

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I've had no success with Bandlab, it seems to be a mess to get up and running and just can't seem to convert the audio stem (which is from a commercial recording and is quite a complex pattern). I couldn't even get it to play audio out at all, so... I stopped caring pretty quickly after that.

But that's all good :) it'll give me something to do to manually program it and I don't mind, I'll learn it better that way anyway.

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TheGr8Wahooka wrote: Sun Feb 22, 2026 4:43 pm
edrickblade wrote: Sat Feb 21, 2026 6:45 pm There's a free plugin called NeuralNote that converts audio to midi with drag and drop features
Check it out at https://github.com/DamRsn/NeuralNote
Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I can't get NeuralNote to recognize bass drum hits as MIDI. Has anyone here gotten this to work?
You need to adjust the transcription parameters to obtain desired transients as shown in the image;
Screenshot_20260224_133604.png
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edrickblade wrote: Tue Feb 24, 2026 5:40 pm
You need to adjust the transcription parameters to obtain desired transients as shown in the image;Screenshot_20260224_133604.png
What settings would you recommend for transcribing an isolated bass drum track? I've tried tweaking the settings but can't for the life of me get it to work.

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DavidPardy wrote: Mon Feb 23, 2026 9:41 am I've had no success with Bandlab, it seems to be a mess to get up and running and just can't seem to convert the audio stem (which is from a commercial recording and is quite a complex pattern). I couldn't even get it to play audio out at all, so... I stopped caring pretty quickly after that.

But that's all good :) it'll give me something to do to manually program it and I don't mind, I'll learn it better that way anyway.
Sorry to hear about your luck with BandLab. If you're not opposed to AI, there are a number of online options -- just search for

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convert audio to midi online

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haha yeah good suggestion but I'm 100% opposed to AI especially for creative processes :)

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