Pitch reference

You have the score and you have a recording of it — your own take, a student’s, a performance you are transcribing. The pitch reference puts the two together: the recording’s pitch is detected in the editor and drawn over the notes, so the place where the take goes sharp, flat, early or late is visible at the note, not on a tuner.

Click the 🎙 in the header. A panel opens at the bottom of the window.

Loading a recording

load a recording… takes any audio file the browser can decode: wav, mp3, ogg, flac, m4a. Nothing leaves your machine — the pitch is detected in the editor, in the background, and the panel shows the progress. When it is done a notice says how long the take is, how many frames had a pitch and how far, in cents, the trace sits from the written pitch on average — once, and then the panel is just the strip and its controls.

The recording is not a document: it opens no tab, is never saved with the score, and is forgotten when you close battuta. What is remembered is the alignment you settled on, per score (see below).

The strip

The panel: the controls above, the whole recording below — waveform, measure ticks, the written notes in blue, the trace in yellow.

The whole recording, left to right:

What	Drawn as
the waveform	a grey band
each measure’s start, through the alignment	a thin vertical tick
the written notes	blue bars — a bar per note, at its pitch, for its length
the recording’s pitch	the yellow trace; a gap where nothing pitched was heard
where bar 1 begins	a dashed yellow line
the playhead	a white line: ▶ plays the recording from it, drag anywhere on the strip to move it

Sing in tune and the trace runs along the blue bars. A note taken early starts before its bar; a sharp one runs above it.

Listening

Two transports start from the white line. ▶ song plays the recording and ⏸ pauses it where it is. ▶ score plays the written notes through every connected MIDI output — plain notes, at the recording’s pace, so the two can run together and you hear the take against the reference pitch; without a MIDI output it says so. The line moves while either plays. Drag anywhere on the strip to move it. Click a note in the score and the line goes to that note’s moment in the recording, through the alignment — so the way to hear how you took a passage is to click its first note and press play. Closing the panel stops both.

Plain notes on purpose

▶ score is the reference pitch, nothing more: no piano, no ties, no articulations, channel 1 at one velocity, and whatever your synth or DAW has on that channel is what sounds. It plays in the take’s register: the st value is undone on the notes, so with the trace at +12 for a voice an octave under the part, the reference sounds an octave under as well. The notation’s real performer is the playback plugin, in page view.

Lining the two up

Two numbers put the recording on the score’s clock, and a third puts it in the score’s octave:

bar 1 at — where the score begins in the recording, in milliseconds. It is set for you at the first pitched sound. If the take had a count-in or a breath, type where bar 1 really begins.

st — transpose the trace by that many semitones before it is compared and drawn. A voice singing an octave below the written part is −12; a transposing instrument, its interval. The detected pitch itself is untouched, so the strip’s yellow line moves and the recording does not.

recorded at ♩= — the tempo the take was played at, when it is not the score’s own. Leave it empty and the score’s tempo is used (the placeholder shows it). A take at ♩= 60 of a score marked ♩= 120 runs at half speed, and the bars stretch to match.

The score's tempo is the grid

battuta does not guess a tempo from the audio. The score says how long a measure is; the recording is placed on that grid with the two numbers above. A take with rubato will drift from the bars within a phrase — that is the take, and seeing it is the point. Measure-by-measure alignment is planned as a later step.

On the score

With on the score checked, every measure in edit view carries its slice of the trace, drawn over the staff whose pitch is nearest: the trace sits exactly on that measure’s noteheads, and time runs along the notes’ onsets. The written notes appear as faint bars for their length, so a note held too short or too long shows as a trace that stops early or runs on. Uncheck it to see the notation alone; the panel keeps the recording.

The trace over the measures, on the noteheads: where the take was sharp, flat, early or late is visible at the note.

One voice at a time

The detector reads one pitch at a time, so it wants a voice or a single instrument. A chord, or two parts recorded together, give a trace that jumps between them. Record the part you want to check on its own.

Turning it off

battuta menu → 🌣 shortcuts → plugins → Pitch reference. The 🎙, the panel and the traces go together, and any analysis in progress stops. Nothing about your score changes — the plugin only ever reads it.