I am hoping to find an accurate audio to MIDI conversion plugin for drums. I use Ableton Live and Windows PC. I write all my main (House music) drums with hardware, so I like to have MIDI files, which take me several hours each time to manually punch in using the piano roll. Can you recommend something that works well for you?

 

DamRsn - NeuralNote
https://github.com/DamRsn/NeuralNote
https://www.kvraudio.com/product/neuralnote-by-dr-audio

 

There are so many ways to do drums, and none of them should take anything close to an hour. There are so many midi packs out there, but there are tons of them in sample packs also. Making stuff without a piano roll and pencil tool has never been so easy as it is these days.

I thought Ableton has a wav->midi utility for it like this as stock. You could also use Melodyne, or Samplab, and so on. The first thing I would grab is Acon Digital Remix Drums plugin. It basically stem separates audio files in realtime. It's not the highest quality stem separation you can find; but because you are just aiming for midi to extract, it doesn't even matter what the channels sound like. Stack up as many channels of audio with the same loop and the plugin. Taking the hits from the loop are as simple as hitting solo on each individual plugin instance's mixer channel. You do not even have to wait around for a program to stem separate it. You make one channel of the loop, duplicate the channel and the audio and off you go.

But I would recommend getting a good pattern sequencer MidiFX plugin. Also, you can use a drum machine plugin as your pattern sequencer because most of them allow you to drag out a midi copy of anything you make in them. Just match up which piano roll key translates to the machine you are working with or you will have to match them after the fact in piano roll, which is still easy.

Using full drum kit midi files isn't even important, because you are still going to record each drum back into your DAW to mix the track. that way you can put effects on each channel, then setup a nice subgroup with its' own drum bus where you can add more effects and compression to glue it together.