PianoZen vs Riffshed

PianoZen - Piano as a video game! PianoZen is the most fun way to learn piano. Whether you're a complete beginner, a curious kid, or a teen who loves rhythm games, everything is designed so you make progress without getting bored. WHAT YOU CAN DO GAME MODE (piano Guitar Hero) - Notes fall toward the keyboard - tap them at the right moment! - Score, combos, stars to earn - Adjustable speed (Slow, Normal, Fast) - Over 3,000 songs to play LEARN MODE - Keys glow to guide you - No auto-sound: take all the time you need - Real-time scrolling sheet music - you learn to read music as you play - Panda mascot cheers you on TRAINING - Note quiz - identify a note on the staff - Free Play - multi-touch virtual keyboard with synthesized sounds OVER 3,000 SONGS - 12 categories: Kids, Folk, Classical, Holiday, Pop, Lo-fi, Video Games, Cinematic, Studies, Rhythm - All public-domain classics: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Liszt, Pachelbel - Nursery rhymes: Twinkle Twinkle, Frere Jacques, Happy Birthday, London Bridge - Folk: Amazing Grace, Wellerman, Scarborough Fair - Modern procedurally-generated melodies exclusive to the app - Import your own MIDI files from the internet 30 PROGRESSIVE LESSONS - Beginner: the 7 white keys, first chord, scales - Intermediate: minor chords, major scales, arpeggios - Advanced: 7ths, ii-V-I, blues, whole-tone scale TRANSLATED INTO 5 LANGUAGES French, English, Spanish, Italian, German (auto-detected) HANDY FEATURES - Favorites: tap a heart to mark a song - No Internet required (except for ads and MIDI import) - iPad supported with landscape layout - Local progress and stars saved WHO'S IT FOR? PianoZen is built for everyone: curious kids, beginner teens, adults who want to (re)discover piano in a playful way. No mandatory music theory, no lectures - just the joy of playing. The app is free and ad-supported. You can mute reward sounds in Settings. Have fun!

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.