Note Spark vs Riffshed

Note Spark is a practice app that helps you remember and improve your musical skills. You can record a digital piano performance and visualize it, or share it with your friends! Key Features: - Practice mode: Play along a MIDI track - Recording: Record a single track MIDI with a cable or Bluetooth - Backtracking track: Overlay tracks from Apple Music and record along with your favorite songs* - Open MIDI files and share your songs - Looping, editing and much more! Whether you're looking to save or visualize your musical performance, or want to learn/transcribe songs by ear, this app is the right tool for you! Note: - You might experience some latency when using Bluetooth audio devices. When connected to Bluetooth headphones or speakers, you might notice audio not lining up with visuals.  - If you're using Bluetooth MIDI, you can adjust the input latency in the app's Settings.

Riffshed is a practice journal for jazz musicians, built on the card system. See whether you're actually getting better — or just spending more time with the instrument. THREE PHASES. ONE CARD. Every exercise is a card that moves through three phases — Explore, Integrate, Master — each with its own color and rep counter. You decide when a card is ready to move forward; Riffshed remembers when it did and how long it stayed in each phase. REPS, NOT MINUTES A timer rewards sitting with the instrument. A rep counter rewards doing the work: running a phrase through twelve keys, taking a head clean. Minutes are still tracked — but reps are the unit you optimize. FOCUS BLOCKS A 20/5 focus cycle tuned for instrumental practice: twenty minutes on one card, five minutes of mandatory break. Both intervals are configurable; the open-ended mode drops the clock entirely for jams and lessons. START FROM ANYWHERE (new in 1.1) A Home Screen widget starts a session in one tap and shows today's minutes, your streak and the weekly goal. The live timer follows you to the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island — pause and finish without unlocking; the session saves itself. Map practice to the Action Button, ask Siri, or add a Control Center switch. A METRONOME YOU'LL ACTUALLY USE Full-screen metronome with pendulum, subdivisions and swing. Configure click and accent per beat and per subdivision: silence the "and" of 2, accent any sixteenth, build polyrhythm grids. EVERYTHING LIVES IN THE CARD Notes, target tempo, separate rep counters per phase, PDF sheet music that opens full-screen (pages flip with a swipe while the metronome keeps playing), and one-tap links out to iReal Pro, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and more. SEE A YEAR OF WORK A calendar heatmap of your practice. Tap any day to see what you played, for how long, and which cards moved forward. CURATED LIBRARIES TO START Jazz Piano Fundamentals (67 cards ordered by difficulty) and iReal Pro — Essential Standards (30 standards with deep links) are pre-installed. Build your own libraries, or import a curriculum a teacher shared as a single file. YOUR DATA IS YOURS Fully offline. Full JSON backup including scores. Library export and import in one tap. No account, no ads. Free. Built for daily practice — for iPhone and iPad.