macOS
Homebrewverified · 100%
brew install waonlocal Homebrew formula metadata
brew / rank 9143
Install waon with Homebrew, Nix
Wave-to-notes transcriber. Version 0.11 via Homebrew; verified from local package data. Also installable with nix: nix profile install nixpkgs#waon.
install
Additional install commands
Linux
Nixverified · 92%
nix profile install nixpkgs#waonnixpkgs package indexes · pkgs/by-name/wa/waon/package.nix · source: api.github.com
overview
Package summary
Wave-to-notes transcriber
Project links
Commands and aliases
- waon
history
Project history and usage
WaoN is Kengo Ichiki's Wave-to-Notes transcriber: a command-line program that analyzes audio and writes standard MIDI. The name is both an English acronym-like description and a Japanese wordplay meaning harmony of notes or chord.
Project history
WaoN dates back to at least the 1998-2007 copyright span shown in the older SourceForge help output, making it an early Unix-oriented open source attempt at automatic music transcription. Its author described the original motivation as wanting to pick up piano voicings from favorite recordings and not finding a functional Unix application for that purpose.
The project lived on SourceForge before moving to GitHub. Version 0.10 on SourceForge improved result quality by cleaning up useless notes, and version 0.11, released from GitHub in August 2015, fixed a gWaoN audio-device initialization bug and applied an older MinGW patch, with Win32 binaries becoming available from that era.
How it is used
WaoN's native input is WAV and its native output is Standard MIDI File format 0. Users can pipe audio through stdin and MIDI through stdout, combine it with SoX for broader audio formats, or pipe output to TiMidity for immediate playback.
Technically, WaoN belongs to the older FFT and signal-processing lineage of automatic music transcription rather than the modern deep-learning lineage. Ichiki later compared the old FFT-based WaoN approach with Google's Magenta transcription work, making the tool a small but interesting artifact in open source audio-to-MIDI history.
Timeline
- 1998-2007: the SourceForge-era help output identifies Kengo Ichiki's original development and copyright period.
- 2015-08-09: v0.10 and v0.11 were published as GitHub releases, with v0.11 described as the first release from GitHub.
- 2016: Ichiki published a comparison between WaoN and Google Magenta's music transcription work, framing WaoN as an older FFT-based program.
Related projects
- WaoN presents itself as the inverse of TiMidity/TiMidity++, which synthesize audio from MIDI. It also shipped related utilities: `pv`, a phase vocoder for time stretching and pitch shifting, and `gwaon`, a graphical front end/visualizer.
Sources
security posture
Risk level: green
narrow executable package without higher-risk signals.
Risk classifier
green risk · low confidence · appliance
Why
- narrow executable package without higher-risk signals
Signals
- metadata:no-higher-risk-signals
Install behavior
- No Homebrew bottle metadata was recorded.
Recommended review
Before unattended agent use, check whether the tool reads plaintext credentials, writes remote state, publishes artifacts, or shells out to plugins.
executables
Installed executables
| Command | Kind | Exposure | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
waon | executable | indexed executable | Discovered from the local executable index. |
freshness
Version and freshness
These signals separate page generation age, package-manager activity, and upstream release comparison. Version lag is warned only when an evidence URL and comparable versions are present.
page generated2026-08-03
manager version0.11
manager updated
local dataunknown
upstreamnot available
latest detectednot detected
- okNo freshness warnings were generated.
install metadata
Package metadata
| Package key | brew:waon |
|---|---|
| Version | 0.11 |
| Package manager | Homebrew |
| Homepage | https://kichiki.github.io/WaoN/ |
| Repository | https://github.com/kichiki/WaoN |
| Bottle | not recorded |
| Service | none declared |
source database matches
Other package-manager records
Matches are pulled from external package-manager indexes and kept separate from local Automic Vault package links.
Nix95%
waon
nix profile install nixpkgs#waon- normalized package name match
- Matched by: Waon
source trail
Generated from repository data
This page is generated by av-web from the private package SQLite artifact built by scripts/generate-pkg-sqlite.py.
Combined YAML source
View the package source record on GitHub.
Used sources
- Geiger risk classifier
- cross-ecosystem install command graph
- curated package history
- external package-manager database matches
- pkg.so package database
- pkgdb category and tag curation