---
license: mit
library_name: crispasr
tags:
  - pitch-estimation
  - f0
  - crepe
  - gguf
  - audio
  - music-information-retrieval
---

# CREPE — GGUF

GGUF conversions of **CREPE**, a convolutional pitch (F0) estimator, for use
with [CrispASR](https://github.com/CrispStrobe/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

| file | capacity | quant | size |
|---|---|---|---|
| `crepe-tiny-f16.gguf`  | tiny | f16  | 0.93 MB |
| `crepe-tiny-q8_0.gguf` | tiny | q8_0 | 0.50 MB |
| `crepe-tiny-q4_k.gguf` | tiny | q4_k | 0.27 MB |
| `crepe-full-f16.gguf`  | full | f16  | 42.4 MB |
| `crepe-full-q8_0.gguf` | full | q8_0 | 22.6 MB |
| `crepe-full-q4_k.gguf` | full | q4_k | 12.0 MB |

`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:

| | f16 | q8_0 | q4_k |
|---|---|---|---|
| tiny | 0.999999 · 100% | 0.999807 · 98.5% | **0.961643 · 85.2%** |
| full | 1.000000 · 100% | 0.999937 · 99.5% | **0.992563 · 91.4%** |

**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 | full |
|---|---|---|
| in-tessitura | 89.6% | 89.0% |
| octave disagreement tiny-vs-full | 2.3% | — |

**`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:

| model | Metal | CPU |
|---|---|---|
| tiny | RTF **0.28** | RTF ~2.4 |
| full | RTF **2.0** | RTF ~40 |

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](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06182) ·
  [code](https://github.com/marl/crepe))
- **Weights**: taken from [`torchcrepe`](https://github.com/maxrmorrison/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:

```bibtex
@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}
}
```