# 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

```sh
sudo av install brew:waon
```

Additional install commands:

### macOS

- Homebrew (100%):

```sh
brew install waon
```

  Evidence: local Homebrew formula metadata

### Linux

- Nix (92%):

```sh
nix profile install nixpkgs#waon
```

  Evidence: nixpkgs package indexes: pkgs/by-name/wa/waon/package.nix from https://api.github.com/repos/NixOS/nixpkgs/git/trees/master?recursive=1

## Package facts

- **Package key:** brew:waon
- **Package manager:** Homebrew
- **Version:** 0.11
- **Source summary:** Wave-to-notes transcriber
- **Homepage:** <https://kichiki.github.io/WaoN/>
- **Repository:** <https://github.com/kichiki/WaoN>
- **Generated:** 2026-08-03T19:37:03+00:00

## Executables

- waon (alias)

## Install behavior

- Bottle: not available

## Freshness

- Page generated: 2026-08-03
- Package-manager version: 0.11
## 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

- <https://github.com/kichiki/WaoN>
- <https://github.com/kichiki/WaoN/releases>
- <https://kichiki.github.io/WaoN>
- <https://medium.com/@ichiki_k/music-transcription-ec845142aff7>
- <https://waon.sourceforge.net/>
- <https://www.freshports.org/audio/waon/>


## Security Notes

narrow executable package without higher-risk signals.

- **Geiger risk:** green / low
- narrow executable package without higher-risk signals

## Other Package-Manager Records

- Nix - waon: normalized package name match | nixpkgs package indexes: pkgs/by-name/wa/waon/package.nix from https://api.github.com/repos/NixOS/nixpkgs/git/trees/master?recursive=1


## Combined YAML source

View the package source record on GitHub. [combined/waon.yml](https://github.com/mxcl/pkgdb/blob/main/combined/waon.yml)


## Sources

- pkg.so package database
- Geiger risk classifier
- curated package history
- pkgdb category and tag curation
- external package-manager database matches
- cross-ecosystem install command graph