Paradiddle

Paradiddle is drum transcription at paradiddle.ai. It opened with a model that pulls the drums out of a mix and writes each drum on its own line. Upload an mp3, WAV, M4A, or FLAC, or paste a YouTube link. Some videos cannot be fetched, and the help page says an upload is the reliable path. Paradiddle separates the kit, then writes standard drum notation: kick on the bottom space, floor tom, snare, rack tom, ride on the top line, hi-hat above the staff, and crash on the ledger line. Drums use round noteheads and cymbals use x noteheads. The help page says a chart is usually ready in 3 to 6 minutes, and you can leave the page while it runs.

The chart opens in a player with a cursor that follows the recording. You can slow the part down, loop a bar, switch between the full mix and the isolated drums, and turn on a metronome that follows the song's own beats, including when the tempo drifts. The homepage says practice starts at 50% and steps back up by 5%. Review fixes loops uncertain hits and asks which drum it was. A corrected bar can be copied to other bars played the same way. You can also change a note, move it, or delete it, and the chart re-engraves. Save, then export a PDF, MusicXML for MuseScore, Sibelius, or Dorico, or MIDI for a DAW or an e-kit. A tour of the studio shows share snippets, which render a short video of chosen bars, and a blank chart you can start from a title, tempo, beats per bar, and a bar count. Charts play and edit on a phone. Review fixes works best on a computer, because the fastest answers are keys.

The first song is free and needs no card. After that, packs are 5 songs for $9, 20 for $29, and 50 for $59. Pro is $12 a month or $120 a year. The Pro plan lists unlimited songs, a priority queue, MusicXML and MIDI export, and the full edit and review loop. Each song uses one credit. A failed transcription gives the credit back. The terms say to upload only audio you have the right to use, and to keep charts of copyrighted recordings for your own practice. Songs stay private to the account. Fixes can be used to improve the model unless you turn that off on the account page.

Paradiddle says the launch demo is raw model output, with no hand edits. The team says the model trained on E-GMD, a public dataset from Google. Paradiddle also says its double-bass training covers more than 4,500 songs, and that the double-bass chart on the homepage is an example it wrote and engraved at 180 bpm, not a transcription of a recording. The help page says fast double-bass runs come out as sixteenth notes, and that dense metal needs more checking around the feet. On ENST-Drums and MDB Drums, Paradiddle reports more than 8 in 10 hits right, measured in October 2026 on recordings it says the models never trained on. The footer gives a pooled 7-class F1, within 50 ms, of 0.861 on ENST-318 and 0.868 on MDB-23. Per-drum ranges, rounded down across those two benchmarks: kick 94 to 97 percent, hi-hat 90 percent, snare 82 to 85 percent, ride 74 to 77 percent, rack tom 54 to 66 percent, floor tom 46 to 58 percent, and crash 46 to 73 percent. Kick, snare, and hi-hat are the stronger calls. Toms and crashes miss more often, and those are the notes it flags. Those figures are Paradiddle's measurements, not an independent test. The X profile lists the SF Bay Area.

Pricing: The first song is free, with no card. Packs are 5 songs for $9 ($1.80 each), 20 for $29 ($1.45 each), and 50 for $59 ($1.18 each). Pro is $12 a month or $120 a year for unlimited transcriptions. The Pro plan lists a priority queue, MusicXML and MIDI export, and the full edit and review loop. Failed transcriptions are refunded. Checked November 8, 2026, on https://paradiddle.ai/pricing.