Hey all,
Regular poster here on music subreddits including /r/Learnmusic. A few months ago I posted about a free website I had created (https://www.tuneupgrade.com) for creating and following a practice routine.
I wanted to share some news about some major updates I made in January to the app.
Original post for context: https://www.reddit.com/r/Learnmusic/comments/e4qyzw/setting_and_following_a_practice_routine/
Most of the updates made were direct result of feedback from community, so thank you for all your great suggestions. I also wanted to give an extra special thanks for those who made donations to help me cover hosting and dev costs :).
In January, I made the following updates (updates also can be found here)
- Song Tagging - I got a lot of feedback from folks asking for further categorization of songs and exercises. Rather than adding 20 fields to songs for every field requested, I added the ability to tag your songs and exercises how you want to. In the future I plan to leverage this tags to help filter your song lists, and to build practice routines (i.e. pick me a random etude to play, or pick me a random guitar song to play, etc.).
- Metronome - I added a metronome with customizable tempo and beats per measure to the practice screen. The added bonus here is that the tempo and beats per measure will save along with the song so when you come back to it, the app will remember the metronome settings you were last at.
- Icon Sizes- I got some feedback that icon sizes were tough to hit on mobile, so I increased the sizes here. I'm still dealing with some wonky formatting on a few grids but this should still be better overall.
- Dashboard Change - People asked to be able to get an at-a-glance view of how much a specific song or exercise was practiced in a week, and said the pie chart was low value. I changed this to a bar chart which should give more meaningful info to you.
- Books Needed - When selecting a practice routine, books were not listed in the grid. This was a problem for those who used a lot of smart songs and might have pieces scattered across books and were unable to easily tell which books they'd need before they started practicing. There's now a "Books Needed" section above the practice preview list so you can tell what you need.
- Bugfixes - Fixed a bug where time was not tracking correctly if a song or open practice appeared in a routine twice, and fixed a bug where smart songs for exercises were not pulling back an exercise properly.
Let me know what you all think - community feedback really helps drive the stuff I work on next. Letting your fellow musicians know about the app would also be great if you find it useful, or your teachers or whoever. I know music can be an expensive hobby, not everyone can afford lessons, and it's always a balancing act to figure out how to best invest your musical budget, so I want to help as many musicians as possible have a nice practice tracker. Thanks!
Again, mods - I tried messaging you, not sure if I did it right - I love posting here and on other music subreddits (i.e. r/guitarlessons and r/piano and such) about practicing habits and other advice. If there's a way to step this up into an official capacity to get feedback from the r/LearnMusic community I'm all ears.
Here's some screenshots of the updates:
New bar chart on homepage
Tags
Metronome
Books Needed
Submitted January 28, 2020 at 01:40PM by ElectronicProgram https://www.reddit.com/r/Learnmusic/comments/ev7u4u/setting_and_following_a_practice_routine/?utm_source=ifttt
Javier Rodriguez
Tuesday, January 28, 2020