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EarChord

Chordify alternative

Chordify is a good product with a catalogue EarChord does not have. What it also has is a daily counter. Here is the honest comparison, with sources.

EarChord and Chordify, side by side

FeatureEarChordChordify
Songs per day, freeNo limit2 as a visitor, 4 with a free account
Account requiredNo account at allNeeded for the 4-a-day tier
Analyse your own audio fileYes, on every pagePremium feature; the free tier does not include file uploads
Ads on the free tierNoneYes
Where the audio is analysedIn your browser, on your deviceOn their servers
Song catalogueNone. You bring the audioLarge catalogue, searchable, plays along with the video
Chord vocabulary24 major and minor triadsWider, including sevenths
Transpose, capo hints, MIDI, PDF, offlineNoYes, on Premium
PriceFreeFree tier plus a Premium subscription

When Chordify is the better choice

If you want to search for a song by name and start playing thirty seconds later, use Chordify. Its catalogue is the whole product, and EarChord has nothing equivalent: we need you to already have the audio. Chordify also scrolls the chords in time with the video while you play, which is a genuinely different experience from reading a static timeline.

If you want capo hints, transposition, MIDI or PDF export, or offline practice, those are Chordify Premium features and EarChord has none of them. And if you are learning a very chromatic or jazz-leaning song, a wider chord vocabulary will serve you better than our 24 triads.

EarChord is the better tool when you already have the file, when you are analysing more than four things in a day, or when you would rather the audio never left your machine at all.

What the daily limit actually is

Chordify publishes the numbers itself. Its support article on free songs states that a visitor can play up to 2 songs per day on the website, and that a free account raises this to 4 songs per day. A separate support article on the free tier states that the free version does not include file uploads, and that free users see advertisements.

None of that is a criticism of Chordify so much as a description of its cost structure. Chordify fetches and analyses audio on its own servers, so every song someone runs costs it bandwidth and compute. A free tier with no ceiling would be a bill with no ceiling. The daily counter is what a server-side architecture makes necessary.

Why EarChord has no counter to hit

EarChord runs the whole analysis in your browser. Your file is decoded by the browser you already have open and the chord detection runs in a Web Worker on your own processor. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is fetched on a server, and no audio ever reaches us.

That is why there is no daily limit and no account: the marginal cost of the thousandth song you analyse is the same as the first, and it is zero for us. It is the same reason there is nothing to store, nothing to leak and nothing to ask you to sign up for.

Questions

Is EarChord as accurate as Chordify?
Not on hard material. Chordify has a wider chord vocabulary and far more compute to spend per song. EarChord uses chroma analysis against 24 major and minor triads, which lands most chords on clear recordings and degrades on dense, loud mixes. The timeline shows what was detected so you can check it against your ear.
Can I paste a YouTube link the way I do on Chordify?
No. Fetching YouTube audio on a server is the thing that creates the bandwidth cost, and that cost is what forces daily limits. For a video, the browser extension reads the audio the player is already producing instead.
Do I need an account?
No. There is no sign-up, no email and no daily counter.

Where these figures come from

Everything stated about Chordify above was read from its own site on the date shown. Products change their pricing and their limits; if you find something out of date here, tell us and it gets corrected.

By file type

By instrument

Compared with