CREPE — GGUF

GGUF conversions of CREPE, a convolutional pitch (F0) estimator, for use with CrispASR's ggml runtime.

CREPE runs directly on the raw waveform — no STFT, no CQT — and emits a 360-bin pitch activation per frame.

Files

tiny is the recommended default; full is ~38× more compute per frame for a modest accuracy gain and is the right choice for offline work.

Input / output contract

• Input: 16 kHz mono audio. The model consumes 1024-sample frames, each normalized per-frame (subtract mean, divide by max(std, 1e-10)). Reference hop is 10 ms.

• Output: 360 activations per frame, sigmoid-valued. The bins are spaced 20 cents apart:

  cents = 20 * bin + 1997.3794084376191
  Hz    = 10 * 2 ** (cents / 1200)
  

  Bin 0 ≈ 32.7 Hz, bin 359 ≈ 1975.5 Hz. Decode with the original CREPE weighted-local-average around the argmax; the activation peak value doubles as a voicing confidence.

Quantization

Only conv*.weight and classifier.weight are quantized. The per-channel affine parameters — conv*.bias, conv*_BN.scale, conv*_BN.offset, classifier.bias — are kept at F32 deliberately: in CREPE the ReLU comes before the BatchNorm, so the BN cannot be folded into the conv and ships as a standalone per-channel affine. Rounding those would apply a multiplicative error to an entire channel.

Note on q4_k: the conv2–conv6 kernels are 64 taps wide, and 64 is not a multiple of Q4_K's 256-element super-block, so those five tensors fall back to Q4_0 (32-element blocks). conv1 (512 taps) and classifier are true Q4_K. There is no size penalty — Q4_0 and Q4_K are both 4.5 bits per weight.

Measured fidelity

Two independent measurements. Prefer f16 or q8_0.

Per-frame, against the model's own f16 (crispasr-diff crepe on 1101 frames of real speech) — cos_min and the fraction of frames whose argmax pitch bin is unchanged:

q4_k does not meet a 0.999 cosine bar at either capacity. For tiny-q4_k, roughly 1 frame in 7 lands on a different pitch bin than f16. Ship q4_k only if size genuinely dominates and you post-filter by voicing confidence; it is not a drop-in for f16/q8_0. q8_0 is effectively lossless and is the right choice whenever f16's size is inconvenient.

The f16 files themselves score cos = 1.0 against torchcrepe (max abs error ~2e-5 tiny / ~4e-6 full, i.e. f16 weight rounding).

Accuracy on real music

Evaluated on 10 monophonic instrumental recordings (violin arco + pizzicato, piano, glockenspiel, carillon, cello, flute, three folk melodies, brass). With no hand-labelled F0, the proxies are tiny-vs-full octave disagreement and the in-tessitura rate over frames with voiced_prob >= 0.5:

tiny is not meaningfully worse than full on monophonic music, despite being ~38x cheaper — so tiny is the recommended default. Known domain limits, shared by both capacities: plucked/percussive attacks with fast decay (violin pizzicato scored ~50%, most frames having no sustained pitch) and inharmonic sources such as bells, where the model correctly abstains — a carillon clip marked only 39/1501 frames voiced at tiny — rather than inventing pitch.

Caveat: the tessitura bounds are hand-chosen, so the absolute percentages are soft; the tiny-vs-full comparison is the robust part, both being scored identically. A labelled MIR dataset is still needed for an absolute note-F.

Performance

Measured on an Apple M1 (quiet box), 10 s of audio at the reference 10 ms hop:

CREPE is genuinely expensive per frame (≈7.3 GFLOP per second of audio for tiny, ≈282 GFLOP/s for full). Neither capacity is real-time on CPU — the GPU path is not optional here.

Provenance and license

MIT, at every step of the chain:

• Original model: Jong Wook Kim, Justin Salamon, Peter Li, Juan Pablo Bello, "CREPE: A Convolutional Representation for Pitch Estimation", ICASSP 2018. Released under the MIT license. (paper · code)
• Weights: taken from torchcrepe by Max Morrison (MIT), which is itself a port of the original CREPE Keras weights.
• This conversion: models/convert-crepe-to-gguf.py in CrispASR (MIT).

If you use CREPE, please cite the original paper:

@inproceedings{kim2018crepe,
  title     = {{CREPE}: A Convolutional Representation for Pitch Estimation},
  author    = {Kim, Jong Wook and Salamon, Justin and Li, Peter and Bello, Juan Pablo},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
  year      = {2018}
}

Provenance and EU AI Act Art. 53 note

• Upstream model: CREPE (marl/crepe) — paper named, upstream repo not linked.
• Upstream licence: mit. This repository redistributes under the same terms; it grants no rights the upstream licence does not.
• What was done here: format conversion and/or quantisation only (GGUF). No training, no fine-tuning, no merging, no distillation, no change to architecture, vocabulary or capability. Only the numeric representation of the upstream weights differs.
• Training data: documented — where it is documented at all — by the upstream provider; see the upstream model card. No training data was used, added or selected by this repository.
• Provider status: under Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 the upstream authors remain the provider of this model. Converting the serialisation format does not make this repository the provider of a new general-purpose AI model, and no such claim is made. Questions about training content, copyright policy or model capability belong upstream.