Show HN: Phiano is a spaced repetition sheet music practice app for iPad

6 points by still_fil 3 days ago

Since learning about spaced repetition 7 years ago, I've leaned heavily on Anki to streamline my process of learning languages and memorizing bits of factual information in general.

After taking up piano as a hobby, I've been designing an approach to my music practice that would help me develop a habit of jumping into daily practice sessions without thinking too much about what to play next. I envisioned a system that would: - store my entire repertoire, including exercises, pieces, and chord sequences to improvise over - manage spaced repetition scheduling to balance learning new material with refreshing and further mastering what I already know - suggest pieces due for practice today, in order of increasing difficulty, so the first thing I play each day is the easiest, making the start of the session pleasant and encouraging habit formation - enable chunking, allowing me to extract shorter segments from larger pieces to focus on, which become separate "cards" in the system. Such "child" cards should always precede the "parent" card in a practice session if both are due.

As a professional iOS developer, I've been iterating on an iPad app implementing such system while also using it for my own music practice. It's tailored for my personal use and thus is quite limited/opinionated: - there is no pre-existing library of pieces; instead, I import music into Phiano from the Camera Roll in image format. Sources include screenshots of sheet music from a PDF viewer, photos of printed sheet music, and screenshots from music learning apps. - the app does not evaluate my playing. Instead, I self-evaluate after practicing each piece or segment. - at any given moment, there's exactly one piece or segment to play next, selected by the algorithm. Cards cannot be picked randomly. (However, the active card can be "suspended", allowing me to remove it and its parents from today's practice backlog, moving on to the next best card to review according to the algorithm. I don't use this very often)

I'm quite satisfied with how the app works for me. It has helped me build a strong daily piano practice habit, and I've observed slow but steady progress in my piano mastery level week after week over the past 5 years, practicing about 30 minutes each day.

It's been a while since I added any new features, and the app is very stable, so I've decided to make it available on the App Store for others to try.

I would be delighted if there are spaced repetition and music enthusiasts out there with access to an iPad running iOS 17 or later who find Phiano useful. By the way, it will work with any type of musical information that can be represented in image format, for example guitar tabs.