What’s changed.

Your keyboard stays connected when you move to the next piece

Pressing Next on the results card used to reload the whole page, which dropped a Bluetooth keyboard and made a USB one or the microphone reconnect from scratch. It now moves straight to the next piece with everything still connected. A browser refresh still starts fresh, so a keyboard paired over Bluetooth in the browser may ask to be paired again after one. On a Mac, pairing it in Audio MIDI Setup instead makes it reconnect by itself.

Connecting a keyboard takes fewer steps

Choosing Bluetooth on the connect screen now opens your device’s pairing list straight away, with the tips only appearing if nothing pairs. Choosing USB waits for the cable rather than jumping to a troubleshooting box, and the whole flow stays in one panel instead of hopping between windows. The copy has been simplified too: no more latency figures, just what each option needs.

The score scrolls less, and shows more of your music

While you play, the page now only moves when the next line would actually fall off the bottom, so a piece that fits on your screen never scrolls at all. When it does move, it turns a whole screenful at a time and keeps the line you have just played in view wherever there is room, instead of pushing it off the top. The movement itself is gentler too. If you prefer the old behaviour, where the line you are playing always sits in the same place, Preferences now has a scrolling style setting.

Lessons are free from your first note to the end of Grade 1’s first unit

That is all of Foundation and all of Initial, then the first unit of Grade 1. Before this, the free lessons stopped part-way through Initial, which meant the free lessons we listed in later grades could only be reached with Pro. Grades is unchanged: the first five levels of every grade up to Grade 5 are still free.

Pro is now priced in your own currency

If you are in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the eurozone, the price you see and the price you are charged are now in your currency, taken straight from our payment provider. Before this, everyone was billed in pounds wherever they lived, which meant an unfamiliar figure at the checkout and a foreign transaction fee from some banks. Existing subscriptions are untouched and keep the price they were taken out at.

One slip no longer costs you the rest of the piece

Playing without the metronome, an extra keystroke could put the cursor a note ahead of you, and because it never found its way back, everything you played after that was marked wrong even when it was right. Striking a key twice, re-striking a tied note, or rolling an octave so the hands land a little apart would all do it. The marking now recognises a note you have just played and lets it go, so a fumble costs you the fumble and nothing more.

The app now tells you when you have missed the key signature

Playing F where the key signature says F sharp used to fill the page with red and leave you to work out why, and the hint it offered was to watch the leap, when there was no leap. Now, when several notes go wrong on the same accidental, a short note appears before your result naming it: this piece is in D major, so every F is F sharp. It shows once per piece per sitting.

Lessons: learn to read music, one short lesson at a time

A path that starts at a single note on the stave and runs to Grade 8. Each lesson explains one new idea, then gives you a short piece written to use it, marked note by note like everything else here. Foundation is free in full, and after that the first five lessons of every stage up to Grade 5. If you already read a little, a checkpoint lets you skip ahead to where you actually are. Look under Play, or in the tab bar on a phone. Grades steps aside as the place to start: every graded level is still there to rehearse for an exam, linked from Practice, from Today and from the foot of the path.

Bluetooth pairing on a Mac

Chrome can’t pair a Bluetooth keyboard on a Mac, however patiently you wait at the picker: macOS has to do it. So on a Mac the Pair Bluetooth button now shows you the three steps through Audio MIDI Setup, which is the way that actually works. Everywhere else the pairing sheet has been cut back to one line and the button, with the piano-by-piano detail moved to the help page.

Play a piece without being told how it’s going

A new switch, Hide feedback while playing, keeps the score black as you read: nothing turns green or red, no bursts, no words above the controls. Every judgement lands at once when you finish, along with your usual score, so nothing is lost, only moved. You’ll find it in Preferences and in the settings panel behind the cog, above disappearing notes. Suggested by a reader who found that seeing a wrong note mid-piece put him in his own head.

Bluetooth pianos now work on Windows too

SightReader now talks to a Bluetooth piano directly instead of waiting for your computer to hand it over, which it never actually did. Pairing works from the app on Windows and on Android in the browser, where before it quietly failed every time. On a Mac you can do either: connect from the app for a quick session, or set the piano up once in Audio MIDI Setup and have it reconnect on its own.

Finishing a grade takes a moment longer now

Clearing the last unit of a Lessons grade used to drop you straight back on the path. Now the card says the grade is finished and offers your certificate, the certificate has a Continue button at the foot of it, and that opens the endless exercises the grade just unlocked, where you can either play a few or carry on to the next grade. The certificate itself gained a second card beside Next folio, linking to the exercises at that level, so you can find them again later, and it now reads properly on a phone or tablet instead of only on a wide screen.

A longer count-in

With the metronome on, the count-in is now at least four clicks, in whole bars, whatever the time signature — so a piece in 2/4 counts two bars in rather than two beats, and there’s time to get your hands from the screen back to the keys. Pieces in 4/4 are unchanged. If you’d rather have a single bar, switch “Longer count-in” off behind the cog in the player, or in Preferences.

Your tempo stays put

Graded levels, lessons, drills and scales now open at the tempo you last set, instead of going back to 80 for every piece. It’s the new Default tempo in Preferences: used wherever a piece has no tempo of its own, and updated whenever you change the tempo on one of those. A piece with its own marking still opens at that.

Music you couldn’t actually play, removed

A few hundred pieces in the library were written for more than one pair of hands — a singer above a piano part, a chamber score — and had slipped in through an import that judged pieces by their description rather than by their notation. They’ve gone. Anything you’ve already practised stays in your history.

Sort the library

A new Sort button beside Refine puts the library in the order you want it: piece name, composer, difficulty, your star rating, or whether you’ve completed it — each of them either way round. The last two follow your own practice, so signed in you can line up everything you haven’t played yet, or start from the pieces you scored worst on.

Wait for the right note

A new setting for anyone still learning which key is which: in Pitch Only mode, the cursor now stays on a wrong note until you play it correctly, instead of moving on. The wrong note still counts, so your stars are what they would have been — you just don’t lose your place, and the note turns blue once you find it. Switch it on behind the cog in the player, or in Preferences. It doesn’t apply in Pitch & Rhythm mode, where the cursor follows the metronome, or to rated exercises.

Pieces without a written time signature now click in the right metre

Eighty-four hymn tunes carry no time signature of their own, so the metronome clicked 4/4 through all of them whatever the music was doing. We now work the metre out from the music when it isn’t written down. Two pieces that counted a semibreve as sixteen beats are right now too.

Disappearing notes now works everywhere, and switches off where you practise

Disappearing notes — where a note fades once you’ve played it — only ever applied to scales and exercises, and could only be switched off in Preferences, a page away from what it affected. It now works in piece practice too, and there’s a switch for it in the settings panel behind the cog, so you can turn it on or off mid-practice.

Today now moves along on the free plan

Free accounts get two playable studies and three to unlock, same as before — except the two now follow the study book, picking up where you left off, and the three change each day.

Pitch & Rhythm comes to generated exercises and scales

Turn the metronome on during a custom exercise or a scale and the run now counts you in for a bar, then grades your timing as well as your notes — with the same sweeping beat line the piece player shows and your timing breakdown on the result card. Keeping the pulse matters everywhere you practise, not just in the library. Rated exercises get quicker mode switching too: press the metronome (or tap the other rating in the header) mid-attempt and SightReader offers to switch you to the other rated mode.

Numbered pieces are in the right order

Exercise 2 used to sit after Exercise 19 everywhere pieces were listed. Every numbered collection in the library now counts up the way you would expect.

Your daily practice can now reach the whole library

Today drew its five pieces from the same few hundred candidates every day, so most of the 4,000 never came up. It now picks from across your whole level, and a piece you found hard rests a couple of days before coming back rather than reappearing the next morning.

Today matches pieces to your grade, not a rough band

Daily practice used to sort the library into five broad buckets, and over half of it landed in one. It now uses the same grade scale your sight-reading rating is on, so “at your level” means within about a grade. Where a grade holds fewer pieces, it reaches a little higher rather than handing you the same few over again.

Tap your streak, level or rating to see more

The tiles on Today now take you where they’re about: streak and level to Progress, your rating to Exercises.

A quiz you can do away from the piano

Ten questions on intervals, key signatures, notation and the piano itself, with real music to read on screen. It takes about three minutes and needs no keyboard, so it works on a bus. Find it at /quiz.

What other players think, on the homepage

The five-star reviews people have left on the App Store and Google Play now scroll past under the hero, so you can read what other players make of it before you start.

Tell us about your sound delay

If you play through Bluetooth speakers or headphones, the click reaches you a moment after we send it, so playing perfectly in time got marked late and rhythm practice was unwinnable. There is now a Sound delay setting in the player’s settings panel and on your preferences page, with a button that measures it for you: start a click, play along for eight notes, and the beat line and rhythm scoring shift to match your ears.

The quiz now reads in four languages

All ten questions, their answers and the explanations behind them are now in Spanish, French and Italian as well as English — with note names in the system each language actually uses.

The quiz is weekly now, and it remembers

A new quiz every Sunday. Finish one and it is saved to your account, ticked off on the Practice page and listed on Progress, so you can see how your reading is coming along week by week. You can always play a week again for the practice.

Two years of quizzes, ready and waiting

The weekly quiz now has a calendar behind it: intervals, chords, key signatures, scales and note reading, drawn fresh every Sunday for the next two years. Note names follow whichever system you have set, so the explanations read in letters or in solfège depending on your own preference.

The quiz asks about rhythm now

Two new kinds of question: working out a missing time signature from the bar, and how many beats a note is worth. There are also twenty more written questions on musical terms, notation and the piano, so a quiz now mixes reading, rhythm and the words on the page.

Listen mode highlights notes as you hear them

The highlight used to arrive slightly before the sound. It now moves with what you’re hearing.

Library pieces end where the music does

Most of the library was cut to a fixed number of bars by a counter, so pieces often stopped mid-phrase, sometimes with a repeat sign pointing at a bar that no longer existed. They are now cut at a cadence or a section break instead, and the leftover repeat marks, unfinished ties and half-trimmed second staves have been cleaned up.

The score stays the size you set it to

The zoom used to go back to 100% with every new piece and every new exercise, so anyone reading from a tablet was setting it again several times a session. Whatever size you last chose is now the size the next score is drawn at, on every surface — and the reset button in the zoom pill puts it back to normal, which is remembered too.

The finishing chime plays even with the piano muted

If you play a digital piano through MIDI, you probably mute ours so it doesn’t double your own — and that used to take the sound off the results screen with it. It no longer does. The celebration has its own level, now on the player’s settings panel as well as in preferences, and 0 is how you turn it off.

Tell us when a piece is graded wrong

There is a flag button beside the download button while you play. Use it to say a piece is harder or easier than its grade says — and to tell us which grade you think it should be — or to report anything else wrong with it: it won’t load, it sounds wrong, the composer is off. We read them, and a grade you correct sticks.

Find pieces by what is actually in them

Every piece now carries an ABRSM-style grade instead of a number from one to five, worked out from the score itself. Filter to a range rather than a single step, and open Refine to search by what the music does — triplets, 6/8, a left-hand melody, contrary motion, pedal. Each piece shows a few of its own, so you can see what you are picking up.

Your exercise rating on the Progress screen

Both ratings, Pitch Only and Pitch & Rhythm, now sit on Progress alongside your streak and badges, the same card you already get on Today. One less place to go looking for where you are.

Pick more than one composer

The composer row is one line now instead of six, ordered so the ones you have picked and the free ones come first, with the rest behind a searchable list grouped by period and showing how many pieces each has at your level. You can pick several at once. Open a piece and a new “In the music” row shows what is in it — key, metre, triplets, ornaments — and each one takes you back to the library filtered by it.

See the day your streak forgave

A streak survives one missed day between two practised ones, and it always has. The week strip on Progress now shows which day that was, instead of leaving it looking like a day that cost you nothing.

The FAQs fold away

Exercises, Library and Grades all end in a long list of questions you have probably read once. They now sit behind a quiet line you can open when you want them, so the page starts with the part you came for.

Melodies built from real gestures

From Grade 3 up, the campaign pieces are now written a phrase at a time rather than a note at a time — a scale run, a broken chord, a turn around a note, a leaning appoggiatura, a repeated call, a sequence. The practical difference is that the two hands agree with each other far more often, because the melody is stated in terms of the harmony underneath it instead of being nudged towards it. From Grade 6 a third of pieces are now built as sentences rather than the four-bars-and-answer shape every piece used to have.

Music that tells you how to play it

Campaign pieces now carry the markings a printed score would. From Grade 1 a hairpin swells or fades across the opening phrase; from Grade 3 a piece is headed with a character — dolce, grazioso, sostenuto — and from Grade 5 the dynamic changes partway through instead of one mark at the top telling you everything. None of it changes what you have to play, or how you are scored: it is there to be read, the way it is on paper.

Accents, tenutos, and a pause to hold

Campaign pieces now carry more than one kind of articulation. Accents arrive at Grade 1, a sharper staccatissimo at Grade 3, tenutos at Grade 4 — and crucially they can appear inside a slur, so a phrase can be shaped rather than being uniformly legato or uniformly detached. From Grade 4 a quarter of pieces end a phrase on a fermata: hold it as long as you like, including with the metronome running, and it will not count against you.

Semiquavers and triplets

Campaign pieces have two new rhythms to read. From Grade 3, semiquavers appear on a beat here and there — in pairs, in fours, and in the dotted-quaver-plus-semiquaver figure that turns up everywhere in real repertoire. From Grade 6, about one piece in three borrows time: a triplet in the simple metres, a duplet in the compound ones. Grades Initial to 2 are untouched.

A left hand with a life of its own

Campaign pieces from Grade 4 up used to give the left hand one block chord per bar, in every bar. It now varies: a broken triad from Grade 4, a walking bass from Grade 5, and from Grade 5 a hand that moves against the melody — when the tune climbs, the bass descends. From Grade 5 the two hands also get their own rhythms, and from Grade 6 about a third of pieces ask you to hold a legato melody over a detached bass. That combination is the hardest thing about reading two staves, and until now nothing in the campaign practised it.

Modal pieces at Grades 6 to 8

Some Grade 6, 7 and 8 pieces are now written in a mode rather than in a major or minor key — dorian, mixolydian, lydian and phrygian. Each carries the key signature of its relative major, which is how modal music is notated, so the signature says one thing and the tune keeps returning to another. It is the clearest way to meet the sound of folk and early music on the page.

Write an exercise as a waltz, a march or a folk song

Exercises can now be generated in a named style. A waltz gets triple time and an um-pah-pah bass; a march gets dotted rhythms, detached notes and accents on the strong beats; a folk song starts on an upbeat and leaves the chromatic notes out; a minuet gets a broken-chord left hand and balanced phrases. Pick a style and it sets the defaults — anything you choose yourself still wins. There is also a way to report an exercise that came out badly, which sends us the seed so we can reproduce exactly what you saw.

Library pieces now grade both hands

About 40% of the library was written with the two staves as separate parts, and we were only ever reading the top one — so the left hand showed on the page but never counted. Those pieces now grade both hands, hands-separate practice works on them, and a handful that used to load with no notes at all now play properly.

Exercises now have a rated mode

Play one fresh exercise at your level, at first sight, and your rating moves with how you played it. Pitch Only and Pitch & Rhythm each keep their own rating, and each serves music at the level you have proved — five rated exercises free a day, unlimited on Pro. There is an unlocks list too, showing which grade your rating is worth and what arrives at the next one, down to the individual devices: rests, dotted rhythms, pickup bars, chromatic notes, chords.

Zooming mid-practice no longer clears the notes you’ve played

On scales and exercises, changing the score size — or resizing the window — wiped the green and red from everything you had already played. It stays put now. The zoom also steps in smaller amounts, so you can settle on a size, and stops at 200%: past that there was barely a bar on each line.

More music on every line

Scores now run to the edges of the space they’re given instead of sitting inside a printer’s margin, and the “Piano” label down the left has gone from the solo pieces it told you nothing about. Full-screen on a laptop that’s roughly a bar more per line and a system more per screen, with the same saving on a phone.

Campaign pieces are written out properly

Every piece in the campaign has been re-engraved. Quavers are beamed together now, so you can see where the beat is instead of counting flags, and slurs stop at rests rather than arcing over them. From Grade 2 the music ties across the barline, from Grade 4 it can start on an upbeat and colour a line with a chromatic note — the things that stop a piece sounding like it restarts every bar. Initial and Grade 1 are unchanged apart from the beaming: they stay inside their syllabus. Every piece is also now the best of eight the generator wrote and judged against itself, so the melodies hang together better than they did.

Endings you can hear coming

More work on how the campaign pieces are written. Rests now land where a player would breathe — off the beat as articulation, or at the close of a two-bar group — instead of falling mid-phrase where a silence reads as a note you missed. From Grade 3 the melody steps into its final note rather than arriving at it from wherever it happened to be, so an ending sounds intended. And from Grade 5 a repeated idea comes back varied rather than identical: same rhythm under new notes, or the same shape re-timed.

Campaign chords now play in full

In the hands-together grades, the last chord of most bars was missing its upper notes, and they turned up a bar late against the wrong harmony — so the left hand asked for a note that didn’t belong there. Every piece in Grades 4 to 8 has been rewritten with its chords intact.

A zoomed score now wraps to fit the screen

Making the notes bigger used to make the score wider than the screen, so the end of every line ran off the side and had to be panned to. The score is now redrawn at the size you chose, with fewer bars on each line, so it still fits — and it stays where you were reading. Zooming itself is unchanged: it only redraws once you stop.

Campaign pieces now follow a harmony

The two hands used to be written independently, so the tune agreed with the chord under it about as often as chance. Every piece now has a chord plan both hands read from: the melody lands on chord tones, the left hand states a full chord rather than a bare fifth, and the line holds a direction and answers a leap by stepping back. All 312 pieces have been rewritten.

Generated exercises use more of each grade

Pickup bars, notes tied across the bar-line and chromatic passing notes now appear where the grade calls for them. In Rated mode the music also scales with your rating inside a grade, so climbing through a grade feels like climbing rather than shuffling.

Generated music stops restating the key signature

Every F♯ in G major used to carry its own sharp, on every note, in every bar — 10,000 signs across the campaign that a reader already had from the key signature. They are gone, and an accidental that genuinely departs from the key is now stated once, then cancelled properly when the bar returns to it. All 231 campaign pieces have been re-engraved; new exercises get it as they are generated.

Moving to the next piece no longer grades the previous one

Opening a new piece straight after finishing one could leave the grader on the score you had just left, so correct notes came back wrong and listen mode played the old piece over the new one. The music on screen is now always the music being graded.

Finishing setup now clears its own reminder banner

Completing the walkthrough could still leave the “finish setting up” banner showing on your dashboard for a moment. It’s gone the instant you land there now.

Scale fingerings now follow a single published reference

Every scale, arpeggio and pentatonic fingering in the app has been checked against Lewis Kesterton’s ‘The Pianist’s Guide to Scale Mastery’ and corrected where it differed. Pentatonics and arpeggios now have their own fingering for each key instead of sharing one, and a handful of scales — A♭, E♭ and B♭ among them — start or finish on a different finger than before.

Left-hand fingerings corrected over multiple octaves

Scales and arpeggios practised over two or more octaves showed the left hand restarting on finger 5 at every octave, instead of passing to the thumb. The printed fingering now continues correctly all the way up.

Choose between fingerings where more than one is printed

Chromatic scales come with a conventional fingering and a second one that suits faster passages, and most arpeggios leave the choice of finger open on one note. Where that happens you can now pick, and your choice is remembered across scales practice and graded scales alike.

Graded scales now show fingerings

The scales in every grade are printed with fingering numbers, the same ones scales practice uses. The notes, rhythm and key are unchanged.

Turn scale fingerings off if you’d rather read without them

Graded scales now have the same Fingering switch that scales practice has, under the settings cog. It’s on by default, and whichever way you set it applies in both places.

Scales practice shows the playback line

Listening to a scale now sweeps the same line across the stave that pieces and graded levels do, so you can see where in the bar the playback has got to instead of watching for the notes changing colour.

Scales and exercises count you in on screen

With the metronome and count-in switched on, scales and exercises already clicked a bar before the first note but showed nothing. The same big count-in number the pieces use now counts along with it.

Support reports now notice stuttering playback

If a busy or throttled device makes listen mode fall behind, the diagnostics you send us records it. Playback is unchanged — this only makes a stutter visible to us, so “the sound lags” can be answered instead of guessed at.

Connect a keyboard from your first piece

The last step of setting up now carries a connect button, so a keyboard that didn’t connect — or one you switch on late — no longer means starting again. Closing the connect panel leaves you where you were instead of moving you on.

Signing in for the first time takes you to setup

A new account now lands in the walkthrough rather than on the dashboard with a reminder to go and finish it. Signing in from a link in your email works the same way.

Signing out in the app now stays signed out

Signing out and then closing the Android app could leave you signed back in the next time you opened it. It doesn’t any more — which matters most on a shared tablet.

The app opens straight away

Opening the iPhone or Android app used to sit on a blank screen for a couple of seconds before your practice appeared. It now goes there directly — around three times faster from tap to dashboard. If your phone is set to Spanish, French or Italian, the very first screen is in your language too.

A smoother beat line

The red line that sweeps through the score in Pitch & Rhythm mode used to stutter as it passed each note. It now glides smoothly across the whole piece, so it’s easier to stay with the beat.

Sound plays with your iPhone on silent

The app went quiet on iPhone whenever the Ring/Silent switch was set to silent — that switch is there for calls and alerts, not for the piece you’re practising. It now keeps playing either way, in the app and in Safari. One trade-off: starting a practice session will pause anything else your phone was playing.

A better sound and MIDI check

The diagnostics page is now a sound check as well as a MIDI one, and it reports more: whether the piano samples loaded, what your device’s audio is actually doing, and a short log of what happened in the last few minutes — so “it was working and then it stopped” is something we can look into. Attaching it to a message to us now sends the whole report rather than just the keyboard part. If a page ever fails on you, it now shows a short reference you can quote.

More room above the line you’re reading

When the score scrolled to a new line, anything sitting above the stave — a high ledger line, an accidental, a fingering — could end up tucked behind the bar at the top of the screen. Each line now settles with room for whatever it draws above the notes, and is positioned once and then left alone — the score used to creep upwards two or three times as you worked across a line, which is the last thing you want while reading it.

Pieces open faster

Opening a piece used to fetch the music first and only then load the score renderer — one wait after another. They now download together, so the score appears sooner, especially on a phone connection.

Practise on any piano, using your microphone

Choose the microphone when you set up and SightReader listens to what you play, on an upright, a grand, or a digital piano you can’t connect. You don’t need a cable, and it works best in a quiet room.

The beat line glides on iPad too

The moving line in Pitch & Rhythm mode is now animated by the browser itself rather than our own code, so it keeps gliding smoothly even when your device is busy or saving battery. iPad and iPhone players should feel the difference most.

Your audio never leaves your device

Microphone mode listens entirely inside your browser. Your device turns the sound into notes as you play, and then it’s gone. We never record it, upload it or keep it.

Setting up now starts with how you’ll play

The walkthrough asks what you have to play on before anything else, then offers only pieces that suit it. You choose your first piece by swiping through a few, easier or harder, until one looks right.

A louder metronome, and volume sliders that go further

The metronome click now starts noticeably louder, and the piano, metronome and celebration sliders all go past 100% — handy if you’re practising on a phone speaker next to a real keyboard. Metronome volume has joined the sound settings in your preferences, and the click no longer stays silent after a call or another app interrupts it.

Double-click a volume slider to put it back to normal

Now that the sliders go past 100%, the standard level sits in the middle rather than at the end — so a double-click on any of them snaps it straight back.

Fixed silent playback on iPhone and iPad

On iOS the app could start up with no sound at all — and with listen mode stuck on the first note — until you reloaded. Both had the same cause, and both are fixed. There’s also a new sound check under Help if you ever need to work out where audio is being blocked.

A round-up of the month’s new features

A new post walking through everything that landed this month: the iOS and Android apps, Pitch & Rhythm mode, the exercise generator, practising hands separately — and a first look at the microphone mode we have been testing.

More sound fixes on iPhone and iPad

The last update fixed silent playback in the piece player; the same fault was still affecting the on-screen piano, scales, note training, exercises and the sounds on the completion screen. All of them now make sound from the first tap.

Tap your streak to see your progress

The little flame streak counter at the top of the app is now a shortcut — tap it to jump straight to your progress page.

See how each note lands as you play it

A small word now appears above the controls for every note — “Perfect”, “Early” or “Late” with the metronome on, “Hit” or “Miss” without it — and a run of good ones builds a combo beside it. It fades in well under a second and never gets in the way of the music. Turn it off under Note feedback text in Preferences.

Levelling up now gets a moment of its own

Reaching a new level shows its own card after a run, alongside any badges you earned — with the rank you have reached, and a nod when you cross into a new one. Each card now springs in with a burst and a chime instead of simply appearing.

A fanfare when you finish, and buttons that press back

Finishing a piece now plays a short chime — one note per star, so three stars land as a full chord — and levelling up gets its own flourish. On the app, each star also lands with a gentle tap. Buttons, tabs and toggles dip slightly under your finger. You can set the celebration volume, or turn it off with everything else, in Preferences.

Your streak now follows your own clock

Days used to end at midnight UTC, so an evening practice outside Europe counted towards the next day and streaks broke for no reason you could see. Practice days, the daily exercise allowance and the time-of-day badges now all use your local time. Sessions you played offline also keep the day you actually played them, rather than the day they synced.

Your streak now tells you when it’s at risk

A streak you haven’t kept up yet today reads differently on Today — the flame dims and it says so — instead of looking exactly the same as one you’ve already secured.

Notes light up as you play them

A correct note now bursts into colour on the stave, and the burst grows as your streak does — gold once you’re past ten in a row. It’s on in pieces, graded levels, scales, note drills and exercises. Turn it off under Note effects in Preferences.

What the free tier includes, said out loud

The free plan gives you ten freshly generated exercises a day and three of them to play — which everywhere that lists what’s free now actually says, rather than leaving you to discover it. Pro generates and plays as many as you like.

See what each way of practising is like

The five practice modes used to be five identical rows. Each one now has a card of its own, with a picture of what it is, a line on what it feels like to practise that way, and when you last did it. Two shortcuts sit underneath: pick up where you left off, and today’s session.

The upgrade page now tells you about exercises

The plan comparison on /upgrade was missing the daily exercise allowance that the homepage already showed — it’s there now, on both the free and Pro cards. The refunds question also finally gives you the address to write to.

Set a generated exercise as homework

Teachers can now assign a saved exercise to a class, the same way as any piece from the library — it turns up in pupils’ assignments, counts towards the tick, and shows on your progress grid. Pick it from the new “My exercises” tab when you build an assignment. Pupils don’t need Pro to play one you’ve set them.

Generated exercises that sound less generated

The exercise writer has learned five things it couldn’t do before: start on a pickup, drop below the tonic instead of treating it as a floor, walk the left hand with an Alberti or walking bass, tie a note over the barline, and approach a note chromatically. Each is its own switch in the Focus panel, so you can practise exactly the one that catches you out. Slurs no longer stretch over a rest, either.

Keep the exercises you liked

Generated an exercise worth coming back to? Save it, and it joins your pieces like anything else — it opens in the player, earns stars, counts towards your progress and can be downloaded for offline. Saved exercises live under the generator, and free accounts can keep ten at a time.

Practise the thing you actually find hard

The exercise generator can now be pointed at a specific weakness rather than just a grade: chords in the right hand, dotted rhythms, accidentals, more or fewer rests, and what the left hand is doing. It’s in the same panel as the rest of the setup, behind the cog. Part of Pro.

Endless new sight-reading, written on the spot

There’s a new Exercises page that writes you a short piece you have never seen before, pitched at the ABRSM grade you pick — Initial through Grade 8. Choose the key, the time signature, one hand or two, and how long you want it, then play: every note is marked as you go, just like a piece from the library. Ask for another and you get another. Free accounts get fresh exercises every day, and replaying one you’ve already got never counts against that; Pro lifts the daily limit.

Choose do-re-mi or A-B-C in the note drills

Naming a note now lets you pick which names you use, rather than guessing from the language you read the app in. It’s in the same panel as the rest of the drill setup, and it sticks.

No more flicker between notes

The whole stave used to blink each time a new note appeared in the note drills — it was being redrawn from scratch every time. Now only the note changes.

Play your own sheet music, marked as you go

Drop a MusicXML file onto the new MusicXML player and it opens straight away — then play it on your piano and every note turns green or red exactly as it does on our own pieces. It works without an account, and your file never leaves your device: it’s read inside your browser, never uploaded, and gone when you close the tab. You’ll find it alongside the note and scale drills on the new free tools page.

Name the note, without touching a piano

The note drills can now be answered by tapping the note’s name rather than playing it — so you can practise reading on a phone, on a train, with no keyboard anywhere near you. Names appear as letters or as do-re-mi, whichever you use. Get one wrong and it shows you the answer and moves on rather than making you guess again, and the result card now tells you your average time per note, which is really what reading fluency is. Playing the notes still works exactly as before, and is still the version that earns XP.

Straight answers on every page

The headings across the site now say what the section actually answers — “Does SightReader check my rhythm, or just the notes?” rather than “Timing, scored.” Each page also ends with the questions we get asked most, answered plainly: what the free tier covers, whether you need a MIDI keyboard, how the grades relate to ABRSM, and what happens if you cancel.

Scales and note drills now count

Finish a scale or a run of note reading and you get the same result card a piece gives you — accuracy, stars, and the XP it earned. The day counts towards your streak too. Drills pay less than pieces and there’s a daily ceiling on what they’re worth, so they top up your practice rather than replace it.

Setting up a scale or drill in the app

Choosing the key, the type, how many octaves and which hand now lives in the same settings panel as everything else, behind the cog on the playback controls. In the phone and tablet apps those choices were behind a button that isn’t on screen while you play, so they were all but out of reach. Scales also get the L / LR / R control the pieces have, right above the stave — and both pages now remember how you left them.

A better way to tell us something isn’t working

The contact form now asks what your message is about, and if it’s something not working it asks the handful of things we’d otherwise have to write back and ask: which device you’re on, which piano you’re using, and how it’s connected. There’s a button to attach what SightReader can see on your device right now — you can read exactly what it says before you send it. The same form sits at the bottom of the MIDI help page, already filled in with whatever you told the page above it.

More music on a phone screen

The playback controls now tuck in close above the bottom menu instead of floating clear of it, and the little handle for dragging them about is gone on phones — there was nowhere roomier to drag them to on a screen that narrow, and it was taking up space the stave could use. Tablets and computers keep the handle, and the controls still move to any of the four edges there.

Make the music bigger

No single size suits a phone on a music desk, a tablet at arm’s length and a large monitor, so the score can now be zoomed and moved around. Pinch to zoom on a touch screen, ctrl or ⌘ and scroll on a computer (or just pinch the trackpad), drag to move it about — including when you’ve zoomed out and it no longer fills the screen — and double-tap to go straight back to normal. There are buttons in the bottom corner too. Nothing has changed if you leave it alone: the usual size is still the usual size.

The Android app can now be turned upside down

Your phone’s charging socket is at the bottom, so a MIDI cable plugged into a phone standing on the music desk comes out underneath it and props the whole thing forward. Turn the phone over and the cable leaves the top instead — and the app now turns with it, the way it always has on iPhone and iPad. Auto-rotate still has the final say, so a locked screen stays locked.

A settings panel while you play

The cog on the transport controls opens a panel with proper volume sliders for the piano and the metronome, auto-scroll, and the on-screen piano’s display options — no more poking a tiny pop-up open to reach a slider, and one less thing crowding the controls themselves.

Practise hands separately

A new L / LR / R control above the score. Pick one hand and only that hand is scored — the other stays on the page, greyed, so you keep reading the whole texture. It’s how most teachers ask you to learn a piece, and now the app agrees. One hand counts as practice rather than a performance: you still get your accuracy and timing at the end, but stars, ticking off an assignment and passing a grade level all wait until you play it with both hands. Pieces written for one hand are unaffected.

Printable reports for a class or a pupil

A termly summary you can hand to a parent or a head of department: how many days each pupil practised, how often that works out per week, how many pieces and sessions, average accuracy and stars. Quietest pupils first, with a plain line about anyone who hasn’t practised at all. Pick any date range and print it, or save it as a PDF.

Build a class from a spreadsheet

Export your class list from whatever your school already runs, paste it in or upload the file, and invite everyone at once. It reads name and email in either order, with or without a header, and copes with commas, semicolons or tabs. You see exactly who it found before anything is sent, and anything it couldn’t read is shown rather than quietly dropped.

Class invitations in your pupils’ language

Invitation emails now go out in Spanish, French or Italian as well as English. They default to whatever language you use SightReader in, and there’s a picker next to the send button for when that isn’t the right one — a family who reads Spanish, say, in an English-speaking school.

Your teacher can now write back

Teachers can mark a pupil’s work as seen, or leave a note on it — what went well, what to try next. The pupil sees it on their assignments page, gets a dot in the menu, and an email the next day if there were words in it. It answers the complaint the class tools were always going to attract: I did the work and nobody noticed.

Set work for one pupil, not the whole class

New assignments default to everyone, as before — but you can now pick exactly which pupils an assignment is for. Only they see it, and the completion grid counts only them, so a piece set to three pupils no longer reports the other six as not started. The workaround of making a pupil a class of one can be retired.

Download your class as a spreadsheet

Two exports on the class page: the roster with each pupil’s grade, streak, practice frequency, average accuracy and what they’re stuck on; and assignment completion, one row per pupil per piece with the stars they reached. Both open straight into Excel, Numbers or Sheets — for your own records, or to hand to a parent or a head of department.

Retire a class instead of deleting it

Last year’s group can now be archived: its join code stops working and its assignments stop appearing for pupils, but the roster, the work you set and everyone’s practice history stay exactly where they are. Unarchive whenever you want it back. Teachers who take lessons themselves can also finally see and leave a class they’ve joined — that section used to be hidden from teacher accounts entirely.

A walkthrough for teachers setting their first class

A step-by-step guide to the class tools — making a class, getting pupils in by code or email, setting pieces with a due date and a note, and reading the progress that comes back. It’s linked from the email you get when your teacher account is approved.

Students can finally see the work their teacher set them

Assignments used to reshuffle your practice queue invisibly — you never saw the title, the due date, or that a person had chosen the piece at all. There’s now an Assignments page listing everything you’ve been set: who set it, when it’s due, any note they left, and a tick against each piece as you pass it. It sits in the menu once you join a class, with a dot when there’s work outstanding. Teacher-set pieces are labelled in today’s queue too. And if you’re on the free plan, assignments now reach you at all — before, nothing whatsoever happened on your side when a teacher set you work.

Teachers can see who actually did the homework

Every assignment now shows how many pupils have finished it, started it, or not begun — and opens into a per-pupil list with a tick for each piece they’ve passed, quietest pupils first. Assignments can carry a note telling pupils what to focus on, and can be edited rather than deleted and rebuilt.

A weekly summary of how your class is going

Teachers get a Monday email: who practised, who hasn’t touched anything all week, and where each assignment stands. Switch it off under Settings → Teaching if you’d rather not.

Rename a class, remove a pupil, and other overdue tidying

Classes can be renamed, pupils can be removed without deleting the whole class, and anything destructive now asks first. The class page shows pupil and assignment counts at a glance, works properly on a phone, tells you when an invitation bounced rather than leaving it saying “Invited” for a month, and no longer shows teacher controls to pupils who happen to open it.

Ask a grown-up to unlock your assignments

If your teacher set you pieces beyond the free plan, you can now send a parent the details in one tap instead of being shown a subscription page you can’t act on.

Invite students to your class by email

Verified teachers can paste a list of email addresses on the class page — up to a whole school year at once — and every student gets an invitation with a join button. The link works whether or not they have an account yet: new students sign up through it and land straight in the class after confirming. There’s a copyable join link too (open to every teacher, verified or not), and pending invitations can be revoked.

Joining a class is easier — and you can be in more than one

There’s a proper Join a class page now, in the menu for anyone who isn’t a teacher, instead of a field hidden in preferences. Invitations sent to your email appear in the app automatically, joining always asks before sharing your progress with the teacher, students can belong to several classes at once, and you can leave a class any time from Preferences.

Teachers can now see each pupil’s progress

The class list now shows every pupil’s grade and practice streak — like the card on the homepage — and tapping a pupil opens their detail: when they last practised, how many sessions this week, their average accuracy, recent pieces, and the pieces they’re stuck on. Only the teacher sees this; classmates never see each other’s numbers.

Teacher applications now come with a reply

The application form finally asks where to reach you, confirms your application by email, and lets you know the decision either way — usually within a day or two.

A friendly pointer to the connect button

If you open a piece with no keyboard connected, a small bubble now points to the connect button, and it remembers your last keyboard by name. It also appears if you press play and nothing comes through, in case the keyboard just isn’t plugged in. Dismiss it once and it stays out of your way.

Endings that breathe

The final bar now plays out to its full length — the metronome clicks it through in Pitch & Rhythm mode, and the same pulse guides the pause in Pitch Only — and any notes still sounding fade away naturally instead of being cut off the moment the piece is done.

Full-screen music, and a score that scrolls sideways

The music’s controls now live in one neat row at its top right: previous and next piece, download for offline, and two new view buttons. On a computer, one clears everything else away so the score fills the screen in plain white — on phones the score is simply always full screen; the other lays the whole piece out on a single line that glides smoothly along as you play — like a teleprompter — and you can drag it back and forth yourself. Turning your phone sideways switches to the single line on its own; turn it back and the score folds back into lines. However you set things, your choice sticks for every piece.

A proper piano on screen, and controls you can move out of the way

The on-screen piano now looks and plays like a real one: keys wide enough for fingertips — around three octaves on a tablet in landscape — black keys with real depth, keys that dip when you press them, and a C2, C3, C4 marker on every C so you always know where you are. You can slide a finger along the keys and hear every note, and swipe the dark bar at the top downwards to put it away. Reopening it always brings your playing range back to the centre. The computer-keyboard letters on each key are now off unless you want them, with a Keybinds switch in the piano’s own top bar. It also fills a sensible share of the screen now — about a fifth of an upright tablet, and two-fifths of a phone held sideways, leaving the rest for the music. The floating playback controls can be dragged by the dots beside them to the bottom, top, left or right of the screen; the four spots light up as you drag, and they stay where you put them.

Sound comes back after another app borrows your speakers

If GarageBand — or a phone call, or anything else that takes over the audio — interrupted SightReader, the piano went silent for good and only reloading the page brought it back. It now recovers on its own.

A louder piano, bigger touch keys, and a phone that works sideways

The built-in piano sound now goes properly loud at full volume — it used to top out too quiet, especially on phone speakers. The on-screen piano’s keys are a third wider on touch screens, so a fingertip lands where you meant. And holding a phone sideways now hides the top bar and slims the bottom one, leaving the room for the music itself. Long piece titles also wrap instead of being cut short, and Bluetooth pairing help now reminds you to disconnect your keyboard from any device it auto-connects to.

A tidier menu on wide screens, and the same shortcuts everywhere

The side menu now groups Grades, Library, Notes and Scales under “Play”, with adding your own music, your downloads, your classes and your preferences under “More” — the same shortcuts the phone menu offers. Downloads also keeps the menu on screen now instead of dropping you onto a page with no way back.

Faster public pages if you’re a long way from the UK

Our public pages — the guides, comparisons and blog — are now served from a copy near you rather than assembled in Britain each time. Signed-in pages still fetch your data from Dublin, so there is more to do here for anyone practising from outside Europe.

A “More” menu on phones, so nothing is buried

The last tab in the bottom bar now opens a short menu. Adding your own sheet music, your offline downloads and — if you teach — your classes all live there. Previously you had to already know the web address to reach them on a phone.

A page for the iPhone, iPad and Android apps

sightreader.app/apps has both store links in one place, plus the reason the app matters more on iOS: no iPhone or iPad browser can talk to a MIDI keyboard, so on those devices the app is the only way to have your playing marked.

Spanish, French and Italian pages now have titles in the right language

The pages themselves were translated, but a dozen of them still showed an English title and description in search results and browser tabs. They now match the page you are actually reading.

Twenty-one head-to-head app comparisons, and a roundup to go with them

Every piano sight-reading and learning app worth considering now has a comparison page with checked prices, a feature table and a section on when the other product is the better fit. The roundup at /best-sight-reading-apps publishes its criteria before its results.

Why sight-reading apps need a MIDI keyboard

A long piece on what MIDI transmits, what audio transcription can and cannot do, and why we take MIDI in from your keyboard and MusicXML in for scores. It is also the honest answer to “why no microphone support?”.

The metronome now has a line you can see

Turn it on and a line sweeps across the score in time with the beat, reaching each note exactly when it should be played. Practice also counts you in for a full bar first, with the beat number on screen, so you are not starting cold on beat one. Listen mode gets the same line, following the playback.

SightReader is on the App Store and Google Play

The iOS and Android apps are the full product rather than a companion: the whole library, every grade, uploads, offline downloads and teacher views. On iPhone and iPad the app is also the only way to use a MIDI keyboard, because no iOS browser supports Web MIDI.

Plug a keyboard in mid-session and we switch to it

If you connect a MIDI keyboard while the app is already open and nothing else is active, it becomes your input device automatically. Previously you had to reconnect by hand.

Listen mode: hear a piece before you read it

Any piece, any grade level, played back with dynamics and articulation so you know what you are aiming at. The transport dock beneath the score now also carries tempo control, a metronome you can sync to, and separate volume sliders.

Schytte’s 25 Melodious Studies added to the free tier

The free library is now 54 pieces — Schäfer’s Book 1 plus the Schytte studies.

Next and previous piece buttons on every player page

The apps speak Spanish, French and Italian

The native apps now follow the same four languages as the website.

New accounts start by finding their level

Sign up and the first thing you do is the placement check rather than a form: pick a rough level, adjust it against a real piece, then play it.

Redesigned for phones

A proper app shell on small screens — bottom navigation, larger touch targets, and a score that uses the width it has.

Rebuilt the emails we send you

Sign-in, welcome and account emails now render properly on mobile and in dark mode.

MIDI troubleshooting, built into the app

If your keyboard does not appear, the connection panel now walks you through the usual causes instead of leaving you to guess.

Magic-link sign-in opens straight into the iOS app

Buy Pro inside the apps

Subscriptions through the App Store and Google Play, alongside the existing card checkout on the website. Buy on either and sign in with the same account.

MIDI connection made reliable across the whole app

Your keyboard now stays connected as you move between practice, grades, scales and notes, instead of needing a fresh handshake on each page.

The on-screen piano works properly on touchscreens

A daily dashboard

Open the app to today’s practice, your streak and where you left off, rather than to a menu. Library, progress and account pages all load noticeably faster too.

Sign in with Apple, and delete your account yourself

Account deletion is now a button in your account settings, with a 30-day grace period before anything is purged.

Practise offline

Pro subscribers can download pieces and grade levels for use with no connection — on a train, in a practice room, anywhere the signal is not. SightReader also installs as an app from the browser.

Badges and public profiles

Cosmetic achievements for the things worth marking — keys covered, grades finished, streaks kept — and a shareable profile page. You can turn the public page off in your account settings.

Annual Pro plan, 20% cheaper than monthly

A written guide for every grade

What the sight-reading test actually asks for at each level, from Initial through Grade 8, and how to practise for it.

All nine grade tracks complete

Initial Grade through Grade 8 — around 340 purpose-built exercises, each written to the published ABRSM sight-reading parameters for its level.

Multi-octave scales, matched to real grade expectations

Grade certificates

Finish a grade and we issue a certificate with your accuracy and the pieces you read. Download it as a PDF or share the link.

XP, levels and eight tiers

Every star you earn counts towards a level, and levels group into tiers from Novice to Legend.