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Speaking only for myself here... I don't really do anything with the information long-term. What I use it more is for day-to-day practice and to make sure I get to the various tasks I want to be working on enough times during the week. I have scales, exercise, in-progress pieces, repertoire, duets, amd future pieces (and a few more folders). Sometimes I don't get to the piano until 10 at night, and I'm pretty tired... I use the practice app so that I know what is at the top of the priority list, and also what I have or haven't done over the last few days. It makes it easy for me to just sit down and practice... and feels like an effortless way to keep track of the various categories etc. That might not sound like much, but it makes a huge difference to me. Even when I have very little time to practice, I can make progress on new music and maintain rep pieces. And when I have more time to practice, I make better use of that time.

I used to make and print out a practice menu on paper and I would redo it each month, but it was a pain and since I wrote down or made check marks by what I practiced, i had to make a new one regularly. The phone app is much more streamlined and "renewable" if that makes sense.

I too was upset to lose the Music Practice Journal when I updated. I have started using Praxis Music Practice Journal, which is somewhat similar. It will show your practice history according to pieces/files, with graphs. Don't like it quite as well as the old one, but it does the trick.

Thanks for the info. I will give this a try. I am bit worried that this app was last updated on March 2015 though...

Tried Praxis today - not for me. Too many bells and whistles make it hard to use. Not organized well. Why must I rate every practice session? I can't find where it says how many total minutes I practiced today - just a bar chart which is not very accurate. And it doesn't respond well - I have to stab the "stop" button 5 or 6 times before it will actually stop the timer.

So still looking...

Sam

I am now trying Praxis. I agree with your comments. The app also drained half the battery of my iPhone yesterday while on the background. It is indeed inferior to Music Journal but at least I can log my practice sessions with it. The issue is that the last update to this app was more two years ago and the developer's site does not exist anymore. So, this will only work until the next major iOS upgrade. The worse is that it seems that the data cannot be exported out of this app, so all will be lost.

There are probably apps for task planning with time logging that could do this job. But I have tested several already and kept none. SInce the number of "productivity" apps is huge, there is still some hope...

I've been using the free version of "Hours" for a few weeks now. It works - designed for tracking billable hours. I guess I will try the Inspire Music Practice Journal to see if it is usable.

Sam

I tried the Inspire Music Practice Journal the last 2 days.

Easier to use, although I have no use for the obtrusive "inspire" part of the app.

But it does not report how long I practiced today unless I look at a bar chart, which is not very accurate.
I cannot see how long I practiced an individual piece today at all - just cumulative totals for all days.

Couldn't see these obvious problems until I used it 2 days in a row.

So its missing some crucial data - I know it has the data, but it does not report it anywhere that I can find.

There is no export, so once the app goes away, so does your data.

Sam

I have an Android device as well and have been testing some practice logging apps. So far my experience is as bad as in the iOS world. The free apps are useless. I also tried a couple of paid apps but had to ask for a refund soon afterwards. Despite its quirks and limitations, the Praxis Music Practice Journal seems to be the most acceptable app . But I will not continue to use it as the data cannot be exported and the app seems to be no longer supported. With thousands and thousands of apps on the google and iOS stores it is really impressive that nothing seems to available for this purpose.

I think that trying to use Excel to reproduce the functionality of the old Music Journal or Praxis Music Practice would end up being too complex. Developing a MS Access application would be quite straightforward but that would mean using a computer/laptop to record the practice sessions...

Out of curiosity what would be your desired feature list for such an app?

An app should do one thing well. The problem I have seen with all the apps is that they add too many features without getting the basics right first.

The most important function is starting and stopping the timer. Make it very easy to start and stop the timer for each item. No extra buttons to press, no inspirational quotes, no "rating" the experience. I don't want to have to flip to different pages or drill down to get to the spot or answer silly questions before I can start and stop the timer.

An easy way to see:
- how many minutes I practiced total today in a number.
- how many minutes I practiced the current piece today in a number.
- a bar chart to compare number of minutes per day for the last week.
- which items I forgot to practice today - as simple as "not practiced today"

Organize the practice items in folders that can be named, so I can have a set for Fall 2017 then Spring 2018, or current and recycled, or whatever I want.

An export to excel file or csv file so I can save the data and load it in excel.

A way to remove a practice item from the visible list when I am done with it without it affecting the past totals.

Call the items "items", not songs or pieces or force me to put them in categories or give them tags - I will decide what items I want to practice and what to call them.

Don't waste your valuable time writing a recorder or a metronome, just make sure the timer continues to run in the background while I run other apps.

I would pay $$ for this simple app!

Sam

Vid, I wrote about how I use Music Journal in an earlier post in this thread, but at the most basic level, the feature that I want most is to be able to look at the list of pieces and see when I practiced each piece last (so, with Music Journal, it shows 1 day ago, 2 days ago etc). So it's kind of like an activity tracker, but the non-music specific apps I've seen tend to seem like I won't be able to have the number of items I need or they're not customizable enough.

Beyond tracking when I practice what piece, I also want to be able to make folders and customize what I see when I first open the app. What I have set up right now is that I see the in-progress pieces listed (and scales and exercises), those are the things I want to be playing every day, so they are at the top and not inside any folders. Underneath that I have folders, which I can customize the names of. Right now my folders are "piano-violin duets," "repertoire," "Christmas music" and a few extras like "pieces to come back to."

Inside the folders are again individual pieces listed where I can see when each was last last practiced. I especially rely on the app for repertoire pieces, because I only play one repertoire piece (maybe two, or sometimes none) per practice session, so I pick one that hasn't been played recently, and I rely on the date tracker to make sure I'm getting to all the pieces on that list often enough to maintain them.

Music Journal has a few other features that I rarely use but that also don't get in the way. (Like the MM marking etc). Having these features not be intrusive is actually a big deal, esp since Inspire sounds kind of clogged up, as does Hours, with unnecessary functions that get in the way of the main functions.

The other feature that I want is absolute ease of use. I open the app, either click on a piece or open a folder, but once I've selected the piece, I don't have to do anything special to get it to start tracking that I'm practicing (other than tap on it). While I'm in the middle of practice, I do sometimes pay attention to how long I've worked on a specific piece, but that's not my main concern (I tend to only track that when my practice time is really limited, like I have to go out or something).

Part of ease of use is that I be able to do it on my phone rather than laptop or paper.

So that's what I want in a practice app, obviously, others may be more interested in the other functions, but my interests are pretty basic.

Some how I missed Sam's post just above mine, but yes to everything he wrote!! Especially this:



I too would pay $$ for this, but I don't know if I want to buy the Inspire app or some other overly fancy thing... >_<

Great answers to that question! I've thought about writing an app as a practice aid. I don't feel what you want is that difficult to implement (famous last words for any software project).

I hear you about ease of use. One thing I think that makes it more difficult than writing on paper is using a pad or phone device keyboard to enter data. The biggest pain for me would entering the title of pieces I'm working on. I wonder if there's a nice way to make that easier? Maybe a database of pieces that can be searched easily?

I tend to abbreviate anyway for the names, which only makes sense to me, and you really only enter the name when setting up an item for the first time. And you don't want the name taking up a lot of space - the first part is the most significant. I hate in itunes how you cannot see the end of long classical piece names, where the real info is...

Sam

Just to add to the comments above the ability to add/edit session practice time. This means (1) adding a practice session that was not logged by the app at any date in the past, (2) editing the practice time of a session that was logged.

I agree with Sam S and ShiroKuro regarding the list of functions. A database of titles would just be dead weight for an app like this -- it isn't hard to type in a title for a new folder or piece. Another feature which I think was not mentioned is color-coding an icon for each piece -- when practice time is aggregated per day in a bar chart, this shows up nicely.

In short, just look at what Music Journal already does. For this, you'll need a pre iOS 11 device. By the way, it seems a bit wrong that they are still selling Music Journal Pro in the app store -- if you already have iOS 11 and you try to buy it, would you getting a warning that this app in incompatible, or would you just buy it and then find out it doesn't work?

Vid, if you are able to and want to write this, great. You would definitely make a few bucks and help some musicians. For someone who is currently employed as a coder, it might be a good side project; but then, who has time for side projects? I've known guys who worked all day and then also did cool software projects at home for fun, but I was never one of them. I agree it would be a straightforward project for someone who does App development, but if you have to learn the devel environment it would take up a good deal of your creative energy to get up to speed.

Hi,
you may have a look at Piano Practice for the iPad, a practice organizer app with some interesting concepts on how to structure daily and occasional practicing sessions in so called workouts. The app includes a PDF sheet reader and some other interesting features e.g. to create your own workouts or record and track progress on the pieces you are practicing.
I’ve developed it during my own practice during the last year and it became my companion for practicing on the instrument as well as for my mental playing, so I decided to give it a final polishing and published it on the AppStore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/piano-practice/id1286438117

This thread gave me some ideas that I also implemented into the app.
I would be glad to get feedback as I'm feeling I'm pretty close to what I expected for my daily practice, but you may have some interesting feature ideas.

Cheers
Arno

Hi,
For a couple of months I use an app called Instrumentive on my phone. It helps me to keep a practice routine. I find its design simple. Its features include a journal with time tracker, a metronome and recording (to review progress). It offers flexible ways of structuring and capturing ones repertoire.

https://stonekick.com/instrumentive.html

Happy practicing!
Mathias

So Mathias, are you connected with the app? I only ask because it looks like this is your very first post here and you've resurrected this two year old thread to plug a practice app, which, it turns out, uses a monthly subscription model. And for the record, advertising in the forums is prohibited. You can take out a paid ad though:
https://pianoworld.com/advertise/

Anyway, I checked out Instrumentive, but I can't justify paying $2/month for something that other apps make it possible to do for free. (Yes, $2/month is relatively cheap, but I make it a point to keep my subscriptions to a bare minimum).

For anyone else tuning in to this thread, you might check out Clockify. It's not specifically for music practice, but it's free. I think there's a premium version, but you don't have to upgrade. I've been using it for a few months now. I originally started using it to track a work project but realized I can use it just as easily to track my piano practice as well. It can be used on a laptop or cellphone, and I liked the fact that you can sync it so you can use both or either platform.

https://clockify.me/

I am not connected to the app developpers. I agree that $2/month is on the expensive side for something quite so simple. Myself, I started using it when it was still free. There is the possibility of trial for 30 days for everyone to see if the music focused features are worth the money.