Audio to MIDI added too many notes: how to remove them

Look at where the extras are first

“Too many notes” is three different problems, and each has a different fix. Turning one slider up and hoping works badly, because the same slider that removes the junk also removes the quiet notes you wanted. Look at the piano roll for a moment and see which pattern you have:

• Extras sit in one pitch region — a stripe at the very bottom or very top, or a row an octave above the real melody.
• Extras are very short — dots and dashes scattered between the real notes, at any pitch.
• One long note is chopped into repeats — the same pitch struck again and again where you held it.

Extras in one pitch region

These are not performance at all. Low stripes are usually rumble, handling noise or the body of a room; high rows are overtones, which the model sometimes reports as notes in their own right, especially on distorted guitar and bright synth leads.

Use Pitch range. Set the lower and upper handles just outside the lowest and highest notes the instrument really played. It is the most precise tool here because it removes by what the note is, not by how loud or long it is, so it cannot touch a real note inside the range. A voice rarely needs anything below about C2 or above C6; a standard guitar starts at E2.

Very short extras

Blips between real notes come from noise, breath, string squeak and the edges of notes where the pitch wobbles. They have in common that they are short.

1. Set Remove short notes to about 100 ms and listen. Raise it in steps of 10 to 20 ms. Stop as soon as a real note disappears.
2. If real notes start to go before the junk does, you have reached what this slider can do. Go back a step and handle the rest with Sensitivity, below.
3. Check fast passages specifically. Notes below roughly 80 ms are fast runs as often as they are junk, and this slider cannot tell the difference.

Remove short notes or Minimum note length?

They look the same and are not. Minimum note length sits in the first group and tells the model what it may report, so changing it re-runs the note extraction. Remove short notes sits in the second group and just filters the notes you can already see, instantly and reversibly. Start with the second; reach for the first only if the second does not do it.

Quiet extras

Faint notes under a loud line are often reverb tails and bleed. Two ways to handle them, depending on whether you want to lose that quiet detail:

• Remove quiet notes drops everything below a share of the loudest note. It is blunt: it will also drop a deliberate soft passage. Use it on material with an even dynamic.
• Sensitivity, in the first group, sets how confident the model must be that a note started. Raise it from the default towards 0.6 to 0.7 for fewer, surer notes. Quiet notes go first, then marginal ones.

A held note chopped into repeats

The model saw a false restart on a note that was still sounding. It is typical on piano with pedal, bowed strings, pads and any held vocal. The notes are real; there are just too many of them.

Set Merge repeated notes to 80 to 150 ms. It joins same-pitch notes separated by a gap shorter than that, which restores the long note. Keep it below the shortest gap you actually played — a fast repeated-note figure should stay repeated.

If notes overlap where they should end, add Trim overlaps. It stops the same pitch sounding twice at once, which in a DAW is what makes a part sound muddy even when the notes are right.

The order that wastes least

1. Pitch range — removes whole categories without risk.
2. Sensitivity — fewer, more certain notes.
3. Merge repeated notes and Trim overlaps — repair, rather than remove.
4. Remove short notes — the last sweep.
5. Remove quiet notes — only if reverb is still visible.

Everything in the second group is reversible. Reset to the raw result brings back the unfiltered notes, so you can try an aggressive value to see what it removes before settling.

Judge by ear, then by eye

A busy piano roll can sound right, and a tidy one can be missing the line you cared about. Loop a few seconds and flip between Original and MIDI after every change. If a change makes the MIDI sound less like the original, undo it, even if the roll looks cleaner.

When the settings are not the answer

If you have worked through the list and the roll is still full of notes that were never played, the recording is the problem. The usual causes are reverb, distortion, and more than one instrument. They are covered in how to get better audio to MIDI results, and the examples page has one clip that is hard on purpose, so you can hear what it looks like when no setting will help. Re-recording dry, or converting one instrument at a time, will beat any amount of cleanup.

Once the notes are right, the same filters can be applied to many files at once with MIDI cleanup and batch conversion.