HomeNote listens to your beat and gives you the key, home note, Detune and tempo, ready to type into Auto-Tune.
HomeNote hears your beat, finds the key and the Detune your vocal needs, then counts the tempo while you play.
Each bar is how sure HomeNote is of that key. When one is clearly ahead, it turns orange: that's your setting.
When two keys are close, it says “Could be” and names the note that decides between them, instead of guessing. Keep playing and the bars settle as it hears more of the track.
Open Details and HomeNote shows how much of each note is in your track, on a strip laid out like a keyboard. The home note glows orange, notes in the key are grey, and notes outside it are dashed.
When two keys share almost every note, it outlines the deciding notes, so you can hear the difference yourself: here an F means A minor, an F# would mean G major. A key timeline next to it shows if the song changes key. Every note is spelled the way Auto-Tune spells it: C#, Eb, Bb.
Samples and loops drift. HomeNote measures the reference pitch and turns it amber when the track sits 3 cents or more off standard, before the tuning sounds wrong.
Half-time and double-time are both right answers. Flip the reading to match how your session is counted.
Put HomeNote on the beat or master track in any DAW that loads VST3 or AU plugins.
Let the track run for a few bars. The ring fills as HomeNote gets more confident.
Set Key, Scale and Detune to match HomeNote, then record.
Auto-Key 2 runs on TONART v3, a key-detection engine zplane licenses to DJ and music software (FL Studio, djay and Mixed In Key among them), built in zplane's words for checking whether tracks are compatible and for tagging them. Open-source key finders, like the engine inside Mixxx and KeyFinder, use the classic approach: add up how much of each note the song plays and match it against fixed music-theory templates. HomeNote is its own engine, trained on beats, loops and 808s: the kind of music people tune vocals over.
HomeNote pulls the sustained, tonal parts of the mix apart from the hits before it counts notes. Kicks, snares and hats don't smear the picture, and the 808's pitch still counts as bass.
Classic approachCounts everything in the mix, drums included.
A neural network decides the key. It learned from thousands of expert-labelled songs and producer loops, plus practice beats with drums and in-key 808s, and its answer is blended with the classic key profiles.
Classic approachFixed templates written from music theory, the same for every genre.
It measures the beat's reference pitch first, to a tenth of a hertz, and lines its note grid up with it. A sample tuned to 437 Hz still lands on the right notes.
Classic approachAssumes A = 440 Hz, so a detuned sample can blur between neighbouring notes.
| HomeNote | Auto-Key 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Detection engine | HomeNote's own, trained on beats, loops and 808s | zplane TONART v3, licensed general-purpose engine |
| Exact key in our test | 67.7% | 58.5% |
| Answers on screen | Top 3, with how sure it is | One key, plus a relative-key switch |
| Tuning reading | To 0.1 Hz | Whole hertz |
| Tempo with half / double | Yes | Yes |
| Sends settings to Auto-Tune | No, you type them in | Yes |
| Price | Free | Paid |
684 songs from the Free Music Archive with expert key labels, half of them hip-hop. None were used to train or tune HomeNote. Every tool ran on the same computer, on the same songs.
When HomeNote isn't sure, it shows its top three guesses instead of one confident wrong answer.
With standard partial credit for near misses (the relative key, a fifth away): 72.0 for HomeNote, 65.8 for Auto-Key 2, 61.9 for libkeyfinder. Auto-Key 2 was run in File Mode; the others analyzed whole files. How we tested, with every answer →
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Yes. Every feature is included and there is no trial or account. We ask for an email so we can send the download and tell you about updates.
Yes. Like Antares Auto-Key, HomeNote listens to your track and tells you the key, scale and tuning reference to use in Auto-Tune. HomeNote is free, runs as a VST3 or AU plugin in any DAW, and also counts the tempo. The one difference: you type its settings into Auto-Tune yourself, it does not send them for you.
macOS 11 or later on Apple silicon or Intel, or 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, and a DAW that loads VST3 or AU plugins.
HomeNote shows the key, scale and Detune in Auto-Tune Artist terms, and the same key and scale work in Auto-Tune Pro and most other pitch tools. You type them in yourself.
No. HomeNote never connects to the internet. All listening happens on your computer.
It only listens while its window is open, so a closed HomeNote uses no CPU. You can turn on background listening in its settings.
Check your spam or promotions folder for an email from HomeNote, and mark it as not spam. If it still hasn't arrived after a few minutes, sign up again with the same address.
