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Find the root note of a sample

Drop a one-shot: a pluck, a stab, a vocal note, a bass hit. It reads where the pitch holds still, not the attack, and gives the note, the Hz and the cents a sampler wants as its root key.

Mika was born in Berlin and ignores every attack. He waits for the part that holds still.Pick a WAV, AIFF or MP3 of one sound. It is read in this browser.

or drop a file on this card

Root note or key?

A root note belongs to one sound: the pitch a one-shot plays, the note you set as root key in a sampler so that a C on the keyboard plays a C. A key belongs to music: a loop or a song is in A minor because of many notes over time, and a single hit has none. This page answers the first question. If the file holds several notes, it says so and reads the last one it can hold on to.

The attack of most sounds has no clean pitch: a pick, a breath, a hammer. The reading starts where the pitch settles and is taken from the stable region, the green band. Drag its ends if a slide or a vibrato fools it; the note, the cents and the confidence follow.

What the numbers mean

Hz is the frequency the stable part holds; cents say how far that is from the nearest note, and 100 cents are a semitone. The confidence says how much of the region agrees within 15 cents, and for how long. Low means a short or wobbly region: check it by ear with A/B.

Sounds between about 30 and 2,000 Hz read; higher than that, bells and whistles, the page finds no steady pitch. A sound with a strong overtone can read an octave off for a moment; those readings are folded back onto the region's octave, and the page counts them.

Then make something of it

The root note goes into Brumm as a riff on a pluck over a running club track. The retuned file is yours as a 24-bit mono WAV; a WAV keeps its sample rate.

Audio: a file you choose, opened in this tab; once it is chosen, no request leaves the page. The sound is analysed in this tab and never sent. Nothing about the audio reaches the visit count.