# Ultimate Piper — Pipes: Tuner, Metronome, Music > Bagpipe music app for learning, composing, practicing, and tuning. (iPhone/iPad app by Mixolydian Limited.) - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/ultimate-piper/id6758356939 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`) - Developer: [Mixolydian Limited](https://appshunter.io/developer/1872531628) - Category: Music - Price: Free with in-app purchases - Rating: 4.00/5 from 1 App Store ratings · 2 written reviews indexed - Age rating: 4+ - Requires: iOS 26.0 · 233 MB - Languages: American English - Released: 2026-03-21 - Data updated: 2026-09-05 - Monetization: freemium - User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/ultimate-piper/id6758356939/reviews.md ## What is Ultimate Piper? Ultimate Piper is the complete music app for bagpipers – whether you're learning on a practice chanter or performing with a full pipe band. SCAN ANY SCORE Point your camera at a printed bagpipe score — or import a PDF or photo — and Ultimate Piper reads it into a playable tune in seconds, notes, gracenotes and barlines detected automatically, all on-device. It scans several pages in one go, stitching a tune that runs across a page turn back into one. Play it back, edit it, or practise along straight away. COMPOSE & EDIT Create complete scores for light music and piobaireachd alike, with reactive grace notes and a full embellishment picker — doublings, grips, taorluaths and more. Write triplets straight or with mixed note values, played exactly as notated. Select a range of notes to transpose, re-time, or copy and paste — even between tunes — in one go. Add 1st/2nd time bars, write multi-part harmonies, and annotate with colour-coded markup. PLAY ALONG Practise with intelligent tracking that follows your playing via microphone or MIDI chanter, auto-scrolling the score — turn your iPhone sideways for a full-screen music stand — and colouring each note green or red as you go. Connect a Blair Digital Chanter or Fagerström Technopipes for precise note and gracenote detection. Calibrate each instrument note-by-note; strictness adapts to your level. Record sessions and replay them with synced highlighting, or share with your pipe major. PRACTICE LOOP Loop any range of bars at adjustable tempo. The app can bump the BPM each time you nail a loop, building you up to full speed. LISTEN & SHARE AUDIO Play back any tune with realistic practice chanter or pipe sounds, timed with the idiom's own lilt — strathspey snap to jig swing. Control playback from your lock screen or headphones. Render any tune or set to a shareable audio recording — melody, harmonies and drones — to send to a pupil or bandmate. TUNE UP The tuner hears bass, tenors and chanter at once — a beat meter for the tenors, a per-note chanter grid, and drones tuned to your chanter, not a number. A guided tune-up takes the drones one at a time, with a needle for each tenor showing which way to move the slide. Four tuning schemes, GHB Standard to Seumas MacNeill. Also on Apple Watch. STANDALONE METRONOME Authentic pipe band drum sounds — side, bass and tenor — tuned to your target Low A. Choose time signature, toggle accents and subdivisions, and tap to set tempo. Also on Apple Watch with haptic taps on every beat. STRUCTURED PRACTICE Set reminders, track sessions, and let Ultimate Piper suggest warm-ups based on what you've mastered. Add a "Tune of the Week" to every session. Rate each tune from Want to Learn to Mastered. VERSION HISTORY & COMPARE Every edit is saved automatically — browse your history, see colour-coded diffs, revert to any version with a tap. Compare any two tunes note by note and merge the best of both. SHARE WITH YOUR BAND Export to PDF, share tunes with other Ultimate Piper users, or send as .pipescore to the PipeScore web editor. Create shared folders so your whole band always has the latest music — with granular control over who can edit. ORGANISE YOUR LIBRARY Import BWW and PipeScore files. Organise tunes into nested folders. Search by title, composer, genre or time signature. Works on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION Ultimate Piper Premium is available as a monthly or yearly auto-renewable subscription with a 7-day free trial. After the free trial, payment will be charged to your Apple ID account and will recur at the end of each billing period. Subscription automatically renews unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. You can manage and cancel subscriptions in your Account Settings. Privacy Policy: https://ultimatepiper.com/privacy.html Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ ## Key features - Automatic score scanning - Compose and edit music - Intelligent play-along tracking - Practice loop for difficult passages - Audio playback and sharing - Built-in tuner and metronome - Structured practice tracking ## Pricing and in-app purchases Base price: Free. **Subscriptions** | Subscription | Price | Period | | --- | --- | --- | | Ultimate Piper Premium Yearly | $49.99 | per year | | Ultimate Piper Premium Monthly | $5.99 | per month | ## Recent user reviews (2 of 2) All indexed reviews: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/ultimate-piper/id6758356939/reviews.md ### 5/5 — Brilliant, what every piper needs! *2026-05-20* Written by a piper for pipers. This app has been immensely helpful to me, so many useful features in the app. Worth every penny! Well written, fast, just all round amazing! ### 4/5 — Just one tiny thing *2026-04-21* Hey, so this app is amazing. I also want to say thank you for labeling all of the buttons in the app. I utilize a tool in the Apple ecosystem called voiceover. However, I have limited vision, but can still read music. I wonder if it would be possible to add a feature where you could make the notes larger, or the space between the notes larger potentially? Honestly, if this app could do that and work as well as it does with everything else, I would probably delete a couple other apps I have access to. Another question for you while I’m here. Do you think it’s possible to import a PDF into this particular program and have it play the music out loud? I have tried other scanning apps and they can get the melody notes but not the embellishments. Maybe I missed it, if it’s a feature already Thanks again ## Frequently asked questions about Ultimate Piper ### What can Ultimate Piper scan? Ultimate Piper can scan printed bagpipe scores, PDFs, and photos. It automatically detects notes, gracenotes, and barlines, even stitching together tunes across page turns. ### How does Ultimate Piper help with practice? It offers intelligent tracking that follows your playing, auto-scrolling the score and indicating accuracy. The practice loop feature allows you to repeat sections at adjustable tempos, with the app gradually increasing speed as you improve. ### Can I compose music with Ultimate Piper? Yes, you can create complete scores for light music and piobaireachd, with a full embellishment picker and reactive grace notes. The app supports transposing, re-timing, and copying notes, as well as multi-part harmonies and color-coded markup. ### What instruments can Ultimate Piper connect with? Ultimate Piper can connect with a Blair Digital Chanter or Fagerström Technopipes for precise note and gracenote detection. It also supports tracking via microphone. ### Does Ultimate Piper have ads? No, Ultimate Piper does not contain advertisements. The app is free to download and use, with optional premium subscription plans available for enhanced features. ### What are the subscription options for Ultimate Piper? Ultimate Piper offers a Premium Monthly subscription for $5.99 with a 7-day free trial, and a Premium Yearly subscription for $49.99, also with a 7-day free trial. ### How does Ultimate Piper track progress? You can set reminders, track practice sessions, and rate tunes from 'Want to Learn' to 'Mastered'. The app can also suggest warm-ups based on your mastered tunes and includes a 'Tune of the Week' feature. ### What devices does Ultimate Piper support? Ultimate Piper is available on Mac, Apple Watch, iPhone, and iPad, ensuring a consistent experience across your Apple ecosystem. ## Version history (last 5 releases) ### 2.6.0 — 2026-09-01 Ultimate Piper 2.6.0 — played by ear PLAYBACK AS PIPERS PLAY IT Glissandos now scoop like a finger leaving the hole: the pitch leaves the first note fast and leans into the second over about a semiquaver, measured from Peter Crowe's recording of The Pumpkin's Fancy, instead of a quick blend between two fixed pitches. Notes run into one another with no dead air, as a chanter must. Grips land with the theme note on the beat, taorluaths stay crisp at speed, and 4/4 marches without a saved tempo default to a marching 88. PIOBAIREACHD, FROM THE MASTERS' RECORDINGS Measured against two recordings of Lament for the Children. Piobaireachd now defaults to 40 BPM. The heavy throw holds its low G, the cadential E dwells half a beat and re-attacks after the same note, the note before a cadence leans, and echo beats dwell on their last gracenote. With Expressive Timing on, the variations quicken as the tune unfolds — taorluath, crunluath and crunluath doubling each faster than the last — the note after a taorluath is clipped, and the crotchet that closes a bar is leaned on. Settings → Expressive Timing → Genre Strategies explains every rule. ENGRAVING THAT FOLLOWS THE HAND Low-hand embellishments hang their beam just above the stave on short stems, as the engravers set them. The scanner no longer reads 3/4 marches as 6/8, and "Retreat" is a recognised tune type. FASTER, STEADIER Much faster cold start on big libraries, and the score cursor stays with the audio to the last note of the longest piobaireachd. Keep the screen awake while you browse the library (Settings → Display). Move a folder into another folder. Paste copied staves as harmony voices. TRY IT: YOUR OWN CHANTER'S VOICE An experimental feature for the curious: turn on Settings → Sample Packs → Record Your Own Sound, play a steady low A to calibrate, record each note, and every tune plays back with your instrument — tuned onto the scale from your own low A. We'd love to hear how it works for you. ### 2.5.0 — 2026-08-15 Ultimate Piper 2.5.0 — triplets learn new rhythms TRIPLETS, PROPERLY NOTATED Triplets no longer have to be three equal notes. Write a crotchet-quaver triplet — or any mix of values — and it displays and plays exactly as notated. Make, edit and break rhythmicised triplets right in the editor. Triplet engraving got a thorough tidy too: consistent spacing with or without gracenotes, brackets that reach the last notehead, and a triplet at the start of a bar now stays inside its bar. PLAYBACK THAT KNOWS ITS IDIOM Strathspey triplets now play with the traditional short-short-long lilt, and the half D throw joins the embellishment menu. Reels and hornpipes without a saved tempo now default to a proper playing speed — reels at 80 minims, hornpipes at 100 crotchets — instead of a practice crawl. Any tune where you've set your own tempo is untouched. ALSO IN THIS RELEASE Move several tunes into a folder in one go from the library's + menu. Importing a multi-tune file now reveals the tunes only once every one is saved. Plus reliability fixes for large libraries: proficiency levels and practice history now always load in full, and a tune that showed "Score data unavailable" on one device now loads properly everywhere. ### 2.4.0 — 2026-08-06 Ultimate Piper 2.4.0 — the tuner comes to your wrist, comparing tunes grows up, and every tune gets its own dials THE POLYPHONIC TUNER, ON YOUR WRIST The tuner that hears the whole instrument at once — bass drone, both tenors and chanter together — now lives on Apple Watch. A gauge for each drone in the order they stand on your shoulder, a beat-rate readout that shows the tenors pulling into unison (tune until it reads zero), and a chanter line that names the note you're sounding with its offset in cents. Stop the middle tenor to set bass and outer first. TUNE TO YOUR CHANTER The tuner works two ways: against the target frequency set in the tuner on your iPhone, or against your own chanter. Sound your Low A steadily for a few seconds and a Tune to Chanter button appears — tap it, and from then on every gauge judges the drones against where your chanter actually sits. The captured pitch shows as a green chip, survives wrist-down, and a tap clears it back to your target. COMPARING TUNES, GROWN UP Compare two versions of a tune and the differences now line up properly: harmony voices match against their counterparts, deleted bars appear in their rightful place, and a legend spells out what the colours mean. When two embellishments write the same gracenotes but mean different things — a doubling versus a half-doubling — the diff names them beneath the stave. Bars and staves are numbered so you can talk about "bar 12" with a friend, and when two tunes are identical it says so plainly instead of leaving you staring at clean staves. EVERY TUNE GETS ITS OWN DIALS The score's tools pill slides out into a per-tune control bar: set expressive timing (Auto, On or Off) and harmony visibility for each tune individually — for the modern jig that wants playing dead straight, or the tune whose harmony is just noise today. Your choices sync across your devices, and the global settings still set the default. EMBELLISHMENTS THAT PLAY LIKE FINGERS When an embellishment doesn't fit its melody note, it no longer gets crushed into a buzz. It compresses gently down to real finger speed and leans across the beat — the way actual fingers do. Birls on short hornpipe notes are the place to hear it; piobaireachd cadences still breathe. And hornpipes without a saved tempo now play at a proper 90 instead of half speed. THE SCANNER LEARNED SOME MANNERS A dedication line printed between a tune's title and its first stave no longer conjures a ghost stave, and neither does the photographed page's edge. Boxed volta labels like "2nd TIME 2nd PART" are no longer mistaken for tune titles, so a nine-stave march arrives as one tune instead of three. Composer detection no longer mistakes a bare page number for a name, and scanning several tunes at once can no longer lose a freshly created tune to a sync race. A LIBRARY THAT SHOWS YOU WHERE Open a tune from Recently Played, search, or a fresh scan and the Library reveals it — the folder chain expands and the list scrolls to the tune. It also refreshes itself once a minute, so tunes from your other devices appear on their own. FOR THE EDITOR The volta tool now works in pairs the way pipers do: place a 1st-time ending and the tool stays armed, so the very next two taps define the 2nd. Mid-stave barlines can cycle through double, end-repeat and start-repeat with a tap. AN HONEST RED LINE The bar-length warning learned a piece of engraving lore: a tune's closing bar is meant to finish short by exactly its opening pickup — the repeat completes the bar — so that honest short bar is no longer flagged. A genuinely wrong-length bar still is. FIXES • Replaying a recorded follow-along session now tracks smoothly at note resolution, with the same colours you saw live. • A second ending printed as its own shared line ("2. of 2nd part") now plays on the repeat. • Various fixes to playback, scanning, and sync throughout. ### 2.3.0 — 2026-08-01 Ultimate Piper 2.3.0 — a faster, better scanner, staves that travel, and a count-in THE SCANNER WENT BACK TO SCHOOL The reading model has been retrained on real pages that pipers scanned and corrected — and it shows. Notes and bars come through more accurately, triplets that used to arrive as plain quavers now keep their little 3, and the scanner no longer invents first- and second-time brackets that aren't on the page. It has also learned the rest of the embellishment vocabulary: thumb and half variants, double and triple strikes, the dili, the chelalho, and double-dotted rhythms all come through by name now. And it's fast now. The reading engine remembers its work instead of redoing it for every note, so a full page that used to take minutes lands in under half a minute on recent iPhones — same accuracy, note for note, just without the wait. TITLES FROM THE MARGINS Some books print the tune's name, type and composer beside the music instead of above it. Scans of those pages used to arrive nameless — now the scanner reads the margins too, and attribution lines like "Trad. Arr." land in the composer field instead of masquerading as titles. COPY A WHOLE STAVE The editor's stave menu can now copy an entire stave — notes, harmonies, time signatures, section heading — and paste it above or below any other stave: in the same tune, another tune in the set, or a different tune entirely. Move Staff Up and Down reorder parts without retyping a note. First- and second-time brackets contained within the stave travel with it; only brackets spanning multiple staves need recreating. A COUNT-IN BEFORE YOU PLAY Press play and get a three beat countdown before the tune starts — time to get the chanter up and your fingers set. On by default during practice sessions, switchable to always or off in Settings, and it ticks audibly when the metronome is on. RECENTLY PLAYED The library dashboard now keeps a Recently Played list beside Recently Practised — press play on any tune and it files itself at the top. MUTE THE PART YOU'RE PLAYING Practice Chanter playback can now mute individual parts: silence the melody and play it yourself over the harmonies, or mute a harmony line and supply your own. Your selection sticks between plays. SHARES WITHOUT THE WAIT Accepting a shared folder is now instant — the sheet closes straight away and a progress row sits in your library until the folder arrives from iCloud. Large shares can genuinely take a few minutes; now you can keep playing while they do. FOR THE PIOBAIREACHD-MINDED The edred — the anchored edre from the a-mach movements — joins the embellishment wheel's edre family on E, shown as Edreb, Edrec and Edred to match its anchor. BWW imports honour those anchor suffixes too. FIXES • Very long tunes with a harmony voice could show a completely blank score — the score now draws in slices and renders reliably at any length. • The tuner no longer mistakes a Low A for a High A when the chanter's second harmonic outshouts its fundamental. • Volta brackets now keep their place when staves are inserted or deleted around them, and undo after deleting a stave restores them to the right staves. • A triplet's last note no longer collides with the next note's gracenotes. • Library scrolling stays smooth while iCloud syncs, and tunes save to the offline cache in the background. ### 2.2.1 — 2026-07-21 Ultimate Piper 2.2.1 — guided tenor tuning TUNE YOUR TENORS ONE AT A TIME, WITH DIRECTIONS The tuner can now walk you through the drones. Tap "Guided tune-up": stop your middle tenor and tune the outside one against the bass on its own gauge. Then start the middle tenor — the tuner catches the new voice the moment it speaks, and from then on each tenor has its own needle, showing which way to move the slide rather than just how fast the beat is. Drive them together until it reads "Tenors locked in". If the tuner ever loses track of which drone is which, it says so and starts over — it never guesses. THE DILI, BY NAME The High A throw joins the piobaireachd wheel as itself — the dili — rather than travelling under the doubling's name. Imported BWW files that use it now name it properly too. CUT-TIME TEMPOS, THE WAY PIPERS COUNT THEM Reels and other cut-time tunes now show their tempo at the minim — the two beats to the bar you actually tap — instead of a doubled crotchet count. A reel you had at 170 now reads 85: the exact same speed, written the way pipers say it, and the editor labels the field "BPM (minims)" so there's no doubt. Playback doesn't change a thing. FIXES • Harmonies stay in step: a series of playback timing fixes means harmony lines no longer drift against the melody over a long set, voices start in perfect sync, and replays sound identical to the first play. • Harmony lines now follow first- and second-time endings correctly, and no longer quietly double the melody through parts where no harmony is written. • Exported audio now matches exactly what you hear in the app. • Long-pressing a notehead at smaller zoom sizes reliably opens the embellishment wheel again — the touch target no longer shrinks with the score, and a press between two close notes goes to the nearer one. ## Related topics [bagpipe player](https://appshunter.io/ios/topics/bagpipe-player) --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-05.*