Piano Lab - Your Piano Coach

Piano Lab is a personal piano coach that helps you read, practice, and explore music. The whole app speaks both English and Simplified Chinese, and every score renders in Western staff notation or Chinese jianpu. Scan a printed score with your camera and it becomes a piece you can play back, read along, and be scored on.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Build your library Scan printed sheets, import photos, paste a MIDI or MusicXML URL or an exported score, or type one in by hand. Piano Lab records tempo, key, time signature, and difficulty for each.

Practice the classic method books The public-domain piano curriculum is built in: Beyer Op. 101, Czerny Op. 599, Op. 849 and Op. 299, Hanon, Burgmüller Op. 100, Bach's Notebook for Anna Magdalena, and Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias — over 400 exercises, studies and pieces, organized chapter by chapter and open to the same Read, Demo Play, and Practice tools.

Three ways into every piece Read mode lays the score out like a printed music book you scroll at your own pace, with pinch to zoom, so the phone can sit on the music rack. Demo Play performs the piece — pulse, phrasing, breaths, a closing ritardando — with every note lit on a full 88-key keyboard. Practice listens through the mic and scores you in real time.

Practice with real-time scoring Piano Lab tracks every pitch and scores accuracy and timing, each hand graded independently. A count-in, metronome, and tempo multiplier let you start slow and build to full speed. Choose Listen, Play Along, or Guided mode.

Read in staff or jianpu Switch the whole app between Western staff notation and Chinese jianpu. The renderer redraws every piece on the fly, with optional fingering hints and engraved pedal marks.

Recognize printed scores with AI Piano Lab extracts notes, rhythm, key, and time signature from a photo with a vision language model. Bring your own API key for Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, or OpenRouter, or use the on-device recognizer offline.

Search scores across genres Search seven free libraries — Mutopia, piano-midi.de, mfiles, and Wikimedia Commons for public-domain classical, POP909-CL and JustPiano for Chinese-language pop, and VGMIDI for video-game arrangements. Search by composer, opus, BWV / K. number, artist, or title in either language — "Moonlight" and "月光" both find Beethoven's Op. 27.

Premium piano sound, optional The app ships with a sampled grand piano. From Settings, install FreePats Acoustic Grand (CC0) or Steinway D-274 (CC-BY 3.0) for richer tone — each downloads once and swaps in instantly.

Free play A full 88-key keyboard lets you play any pitch on the spot, with realistic tone.

Practice history Every session logs date, duration, pitch and timing scores, and a graded summary — with a daily streak to keep you going.

Tools and knowledge A metronome with classical tempo terms (Largo through Presto), accent patterns, subdivisions, and tap tempo. An interactive Circle of Fifths, and a Major vs Minor tool that lets you hear the one note that changes the mood. Plus a bilingual knowledge library covering technique, theory, terms, practice, and fourteen major composers from Bach to Rachmaninoff.

Privacy first All practice audio is processed on your device — Piano Lab never uploads recordings of your playing. Photos go to your chosen cloud provider only when you enable cloud recognition and supply your own API key. The app operates no backend.

iCloud sync, optional Turn on iCloud sync to back up your library and reach it from every device signed into your Apple ID.

Free to try, one-time unlock Practice, Read, Demo Play, free play, the metronome, method books, and the knowledge library are always free and unlimited. One small purchase unlocks unlimited catalog downloads after a generous free trial — no subscription, no account.

Piano Lab is built for piano students, returning amateurs, and lifelong learners who want a thoughtful, focused practice companion — not a game, not a leaderboard.