MIDITrainer vs Riffshed

Train your ear with real melodies from jazz standards and pop classics. MIDI Trainer plays a short melody, then challenges you to play it back on your MIDI keyboard. Unlike other ear training apps that use random notes, MIDI Trainer uses real musical phrases from professional transcriptions, helping you develop practical musicianship. KEY FEATURES: - Real Melodies: Practice with phrases extracted from the Weimar Jazz Database (jazz solos) and McGill Billboard Dataset (pop hits) - MIDI Integration: Connect any MIDI keyboard via USB or Bluetooth - Adaptive Practice: The app focuses on intervals and patterns you find challenging - Multiple Scales: Practice in major, minor, and modal scales - Detailed Statistics: Track your progress and identify weak spots HOW IT WORKS: 1. Connect your MIDI keyboard 2. Choose your scale and difficulty settings 3. Listen to the melody 4. Play it back - the app waits for you to match each note 5. Review your accuracy and learn from mistakes Perfect for musicians, music students, and anyone wanting to improve their ear and sight-reading skills.

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.