Questions

What can I import?

Photographs and scans of printed pages, and PDFs. A piece can be several pages: upload them together, reorder them, and they become one piece. Each page is sliced into individual bars, which is what the reading modes are built on.

Processing runs in the background and takes a little while, so you get a progress page rather than a frozen screen.

Bringing your own pages is what the paid plans buy: Étude and Sonata import, Prelude reads the catalog. See the plans.

How should I photograph a page?

Flat, square-on, one page filling the frame. Press the book open — a page curving into its spine is the one thing that cannot be straightened afterwards — and keep the light even: no shadow across the staves, no flash on glossy paper. The printed ink should be the darkest thing in the shot.

Fixed for you: a tilt of a few degrees, the dark border a scanner lid leaves, and the grey of aged paper. About 1800 pixels down the long side is plenty for reading the music; beyond that the extra detail goes into the bar tiles, so a sharper photo reads better at the bench. One image per page, PNG or JPG.

Shot like that, cutting the page into bars is our problem rather than yours. If such a page comes out wrong, that is a bug worth sending us.

I own a licensed edition. Does it stay private?

Yes. A score you upload goes into your own library and stays there. It is never added to the shared catalog and never shown to another user. The catalog is a separate thing: it holds public-domain editions only, and only staff can put anything into it.

That split is deliberate. The catalog has to be redistributable; your shelf does not have to be anything but yours.

Does it listen to me play?

No. There is no MIDI input and no microphone. The app cannot hear you, does not know what you played, and will never tell you that you missed bar 14. There is no accuracy score and nothing to fail.

Where a recording exists it guides by example rather than by correction: phrasing, weight, real fingering choices.

Do I need a recording for a piece?

No, and most pieces will not have one. A recording can only be attached by staff, so anything you import yourself has none. Those pieces open in sheet mode, the two-page spread. That is the default and a complete way to use the app, not a degraded one.

When a piece does have a recording, a playhead follows it across the bars while you read.

Those two are not the same promise. Cutting a page into bars is something we stand behind. Lining a recording up with an engraving is a harder problem: it works on the falling-bars videos the catalog uses and is chancier anywhere else, so when bringing your own recording opens up it opens as an experiment on Sonata — never as the thing that makes a piece worth having.

Why not re-draw the score, like other sites do?

Because the page you have been marking up for months is the page you read best. A site that renders its scores from a file can hold thousands of them, every one in the same house style. Each page here is a real edition instead — photographed, straightened, cut bar by bar — so the engraver's spacing, the plate's wear and your own pencil are all still on it.

That is the trade: fewer pieces, and each one a page somebody printed. Nothing on your shelf was generated.

Will it work on my phone?

Yes, and the bigger the screen the better it reads. It is built for a tablet propped on the music desk — that is the size a bar is cut to be read at — and a laptop is fine. A phone is for the piano you did not plan to sit down at, with your repertoire already in your pocket.

Every mode is on every screen. Where there is no room for a control it moves onto the score rather than disappearing.

How many pieces can I keep?

Prelude holds one, Étude five, Sonata thirty. That is the whole library, not an allowance on top of something else: a catalog piece you put on your shelf takes a slot exactly as an import does, because both are pieces you are working on.

The plans page draws each size as a tally, and once you are signed in it says how much of yours is in use.

What do the paid plans change?

Three things: how many pieces the library holds, whether you can bring your own pages or read the catalog's, and how support reaches you.

The app itself does not change. Same modes, same marks, same layout on all three, and nothing is held back for the top tier.

Can I pay yet?

No, and switching is free while that is true. There is no checkout: you can move between plans on the plans page yourself, it happens on the spot, and it charges nothing. The prices there are what they will be rather than placeholders.

Once there is a checkout, a paid plan has thirty days to change your mind, refunded in full and without questions.

One move is refused: you cannot switch to a plan smaller than your library. Take it down to the new size first. Nothing of yours is hidden or deleted to make room.

Who answers if I write?

A person. Support is never an AI, on any plan. Prelude and Étude are answered in the open on r/hypertoire, where the community answers and so do I; Sonata adds private support by mail.

Can I print, or export a PDF?

Not yet. Sheet mode lays a piece out as two pages on screen, but there is no export. It is planned; it does not exist today.

What happens to my fingering?

Fingering you mark is yours and follows your account, so it is on the score wherever you sign in. A piece shared through the catalog carries no one else's marks onto your copy.