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What apps do you use, and how essential are they to you?

I used to have very few apps, and considered them an esoteric add-on for my musical life. I now have quite a few, almost all of which I use regularly:

• practice log - Music Journal
• metronome - Metronome
• tuner - Tunable
• keyboard - Tiny Piano
• sightreading - Sight Reading Factory, Read Ahead
• transcription - Amazing Slow Downer. (Also, less used or unused - Anytune Pro+)
• play along - iRealPro, DrumGenius
• ear training - Functional Ear Trainer, Theta Music Trainer, Meludia, Sing True. (Also, less used or unused - Ear Trainer, Relative Pitch, inTune, TriadTutor, 7th Heaven.)
• music streaming - Spotify
• reading - Kindle Reader, iBooks
• miscellaneous - Shruti Box (drone), Composers (composer of the day), Musical U (musical articles)

I have used several of the apps in your list but use little of them these days. I use a metronome app for convenience and MuseScore and that is it.

I use Pro Metronome on my phone, from time to time. Otherwise, I use the built in metronome. No other apps besides that. I do use NoteFlight online.

Metronome only... I don't really see any use for piano apps,

I'd love to try and design an app that could be useful though.

Metronome on my cellphone only

So far I'm just trying to app-ly myself

I spent a nice chunk of change on music apps. These are the ones I found useful at one point or another:

Piano Maestro by Joytunes
A fun-addictive reading/play-along app. Kept me coming back for more. Took me 2 years to finish. Songs/pieces are neatly graded from Elementary to Level 3b. It’s a lot more whimsical than Piano Marvel, which is probably why I stuck with it.

Note Trainer Pro by thoor software
Mostly used it for reading/drilling chord shapes in different keys. For me, this one payed off big time, and I only needed to use it a few minutes each morning to be effective. It’s not a flashcard program - the drills are placed on a proper Grand Staff. The main weakness is that the chord drills are really random and are not necessarily musical (aside from the fact that they’re all in the same key).

Flashcards+ by Chegg
Mainly to randomly review\practice old pieces and exercises. Everything I study and complete gets a flashcard or it’s own deck - so it becomes like a time machine. I really like that I can take photos of music with my iPad and load them onto the Flashcards. On a side note - there is a very intense learning feedback loop that happens when I randomly review things this way. It creates a lot of very strong and interesting connections.

iReal Pro - yes just awesome and fun, use it all the time. I like to think of this app as the older, hipper brother of Piano Maestro.

Numbers - the Apple spreadsheet. I use it to keep track of practice.

Safari - because I read way too much PianoWorld.

Netflix - oh wait no, that doesn’t have anything to do with ... 😉

Apps I don’t really use:
- I bought 5 metronome apps, but I still prefer to use the built-in metronome on my digital piano, or the 40 year old mechanical metronome I inherited from my mother.

- Same thing happened with ForScore - by the time I collected all my music into PDFs, I found I preferred to just have them printed and bound into a book at the local copy/print shop.

(... and this is officially my 1000th post! I need to get back to practicing!)

Is apps the modern word for software and computer programs?

I meant to be using ”apps” to refer to software and programs running on a mobile device. It’s short for “applications.” I would be happy to hear about software and programs that people use on regular computers too.

The Urban Dictionary has a definition, with a free jab at Apple thrown in . (I confess that my mobile devices are from Apple: an iPhone and an iPad.)

I had also thought of them being on mobile devices, but lately I'm asked about or told about "apps" for my regular PC. I'm thinking the language is changing in that respect.
I own no mobile device. I'm planning to change that this year. I have a computer, a laptop, and landline. Talk about from yesteryear.

I found a new App that I am using as a replacement for Music Journal. It is called Musician's Diary. It has many of the same functions as Music Journal, plus it allows you to record and to edit the practice times. It allows you to add practice goals for each session, and does a report at the end week. So far I really like it.

As far as I remember,
Early desktop computer code (Programs as we call them today) were called Applications.
Then they were adapted (and using less code) to mobile devices using a smaller word Apps.
I suppose using the same logic as bits, nibbles, bytes, words, and long-words.
There are likely many new words on the horizon.

Apropos nothing, really...

I don't like the word "app" because it doesn't really stand for "application." In my day, an "application" was a piece of software that applied the computer to some problem outside the computer itself. A word processor is an "application", as is an web browser. A virus checker is not an "application," nor is a file manager, because this kind of software is directed at the internal operation of the computer, and not to satisfying a real-world need.

These days the word "app" has come to mean "any kind of software with any function," so an important distinction between different kinds of software has been lost. Most likely nobody except computer scientists or the anally retentive will care about this.

Musical apps/programs I use:
IReal Pro: use it constantly to shed tunes and prepare for jazz gigs
Finale: when I want to write up a lead sheet or a transcription
Amazing Slow Downer: when I want to transcribe a solo
IGigbook: I've got all the Real Books indexed and ready to go on my IPad. It's all I use at gigs and jam sessions. No books anymore.
Spotify: It's my primary vehicle for listening to music.

As someone who has been writing computer software since 1983 or so... The word "apps" has been in common use in the computer realm since long before mobile devices. Probably since the first applications were written for computers, and certainly since before I started writing them. The term was used to distinguish between system software (e.g. the OS and various subsystems and infrastructure software or "below") and the programs/applications that executed on top of this infrastructure and were directly used by end users. Job categories and descriptions used the word to describe developers who wrote those user level programs (App Developers). The meaning was expanded when apps could run in browsers (which are apps themselves) and were called web apps.

It became mainstream when Apple started the App Store and the term became common use by non-technical users. To these folks, this is the only definition they were familiar with. Hence the idea that "apps" only means mobile device apps. But it is not a new word created for the mobile device era. Generally the context indicates whether someone is using the word to refer only to mobile device apps, or to apps more broadly.

Hope this helps.

Sadly for me, it looks like this is an Android only app, as I can't find it in the iOS store. I am still looking for a good Music Journal replacement...

Thanks to those contributing to my knowledge of the word "apps". It appears that the Urban Dictionary contains an Urban Legend .

Thanks for all the reports about apps. I'm struck by how many people only use a metronome app. Certainly when I was learning instruments as a teen in the 70s, the only gadget I used for practice was a metronome (and a musical terms dictionary). So that seems to be a tried-and-true approach to practice that persists to the present.

I thought I would be pretty standard in terms of how many apps I use, but it appears I am an extreme outlier. Groove On, I see that your gigging (learning/performing) leads you to use several apps similar or identical to what I use for my jazz ensemble learning (on flute). I'm not sure I'd be using these so much if I were only working on piano, though.

I'm surprised there aren't more replies about using ear training apps. (Like, none!) I wonder if this is because most people aren't doing ear training, or because most people are doing ear training but with traditional analog methods.

Interesting thread!

I use:

practice journal: Music Journal (on and off, but esp. if I'm trying to remember to review older pieces)
metronome: Pro Metronome
keyboard: Tiny Piano
sightreading: Sight Reading Factory. Good idea and easy to practice, the compositions aren't so interesting. I'm not sure if I'll renew for next year.
tempo changer: Anytune
ear training: Functional Ear Trainer (amazing, I think), Tenuto (lots of different skills)
score writing: Touch Notation, MuseScore
rhythm practice: RhythmLab
theory: Theory (impressively clear explanations on the basics, from musictheory.net)

PianoStudent, you said that you use most of your apps regularly. I'm curious if you have a rotating schedule--because there's a lot of apps!

Well, there's a difference. Not all software are apps, all apps are software though. There's a technical difference. Everything with a UI is an app, though programs that run in the background, aren't. So in that sense, a virus checker is an app. Drivers, Images and documents, aren't apps.

But indeed. Since apple the word is very popular.