Literably vs Arioso

A fast and accurate way to assess reading fluency, accuracy, and comprehension for K-8 students, including a full running record. The iOS app is for student use only; classes must be set up elsewhere.

Arioso is a practice app for the piano. It guides you to learn new pieces in segments, listens through the microphone while you play, follows along with the score, and give you accurate feedback. - Listening - Arioso hears notes as they sound from an acoustic, digital or hybrid piano, including chords, held notes and ornaments, and tracks where you are in the music. The analysis runs on the device. What it does with that depends on the mode you are in. - Four ways to work - 1. Read & Listen plays the piece while the cursor follows the score, so you can hear it before you play it. 2. Note waits for you. Play the highlighted notes and the cursor moves on once they are right. Take as long as you need. 3. Flow keeps going at your pace. Notes your hands skipped are marked on the score at the end, so you can see what you have been avoiding. 4. Perform gives you a cursor and nothing else on screen. When the take ends you get a report: how many notes matched, how many were early or late, and how many never sounded. The notes are coloured on the score so you can see where it went. - Working in segments - A piece is divided into short segments, usually four to eight bars, and each segment gets the same four stages. You can take a few bars, work them until you have them, then join them to the next few. A map of the piece shows which segments are done and which are still ahead. If the music breaks somewhere else, you can redraw the segments yourself. - Scales and sequences - Arioso generates scales and exercises as you need them: eighteen keys, four modes, one to three octaves, either hand or both, straight or in broken thirds, and twenty Hanon-style figures. Each one arrives with a key signature, fingering and a written metronome mark, and can be practised in any of the four modes. Save the ones you come back to. - A player for listening - Choose a book, or the whole library, and Arioso plays through it in order or shuffled. It keeps playing when you leave the app, with controls on the lock screen. - Your own music - Import MusicXML files and they join the library alongside everything else, with every mode and tool available. - The music - Thirty pieces are included to start with: scales, studies and familiar repertoire. Beyond those, Arioso offers eight books engraved specifically for this app, typeset from scratch rather than scanned, covering the Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoire piano students tend to work through. Every book piece comes with a printable PDF of its engraved score. Each book is a single purchase at $2.99, and two pieces in each are free to play first. - Tools - A metronome with a count-in you can see as well as hear. A speed dial for taking something under tempo and bringing it up. A setting for how strictly a take is judged. Practice one hand, or one section. An on-screen keyboard you can turn off. Fingerings shown, or suggested where the score has none. Your own SoundFont, if you have one you prefer. - What you need - A piano, acoustic, digital or hybrid, and an iPhone or iPad nearby. Arioso listens through the microphone, so the instrument needs to be sounding in the room rather than in headphones. - Privacy - Audio is analysed entirely on your device. Nothing you play is recorded or sent anywhere. Your practice history follows you between your own devices through your private iCloud, which we have no access to. No account, no analytics, no advertising.