Where can I find legally usable datasets for advanced audio chord recognition? [D]
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A researcher is seeking legally usable datasets for advanced audio-to-chord-recognition, aiming for a system comparable to Song Master Pro or Auralis Sound Prism. The goal is to recognize complex harmonic material found in genres like jazz, soul, and funk, including chords such as maj9, 6/9, m9, m11, 13, altered dominants, and slash chords. The researcher needs time-aligned audio with rich, consistent chord vocabulary and is asking for recommendations on genuinely useful open datasets, commercial/licensable options, and the viability of using data from sources like iReal Pro or Hooktheory.
I’m researching how to build or fine-tune an audio-to-chord-recognition engine comparable in ambition to Song Master Pro / Auralis Sound Prism. The goal is not basic major/minor chord detection. I need reliable recognition of dense harmonic material: jazz, soul, funk, neo-soul, Brazilian music, film music, and arrangements with chords such as maj9, 6/9, m9, m11, 13, altered dominants, slash chords/inversions, secondary dominants, modal interchange, suspensions, passing harmony, etc. Most public datasets I’ve found seem too limited: either simplified chord labels, weak annotations, or repertoire that does not really cover sophisticated harmony. In particular, I need time-aligned audio + chord labels, ideally with beat/downbeat information and a rich, consistent chord vocabulary. My questions: Which open datasets are genuinely useful for this level of chord-recognition work? Are there any commercial/licensable datasets with high-quality, detailed chord annotations that can legally be used to train a model and ship it in commercial software? Is a dataset such as iReal Pro-style chord charts, Hooktheory, Ultimate Guitar, Chordify, or similar usable in any legitimate/licensable way — or are they generally not viable due to rights and annotation quality? For a serious model, is the realistic route to combine public datasets with a privately licensed/hand-annotated corpus? If so, roughly how many accurately annotated tracks would be needed before it becomes meaningfully good at jazz-influenced harmony? Are there papers, benchmarks, companies, or dataset vendors I should study before spending money? I’m specifically looking for practical, legally usable data sources—not advice to scrape chord sites. Any experience from people who have trained MIR / chord-recognition models would be very valuable.