Best Apps to Track Piano Repertoire in 2026

Marc-André Hamelin has admitted that a substantial portion of his recorded repertoire was learned for the sessions and then basically forgotten. If a pianist with that career and that memory cannot keep everything alive, the rest of us should stop pretending we can either.

That admission, reported by Gramophone, is the most honest thing any concert pianist has said about repertoire in years. It also names the problem this article is about. Most piano "practice trackers" count minutes. A repertoire tracker has to do something harder: keep an accurate map of which pieces are ready now, which would need a week of repair, which would need a rebuild, and which exist only as ambition. That is what this guide is comparing — not journaling tools, not metronomes, not lesson platforms.

A repertoire tracker is not a practice tracker

It is tempting to treat the two as the same product. They are not. A practice tracker organizes sessions: how long, how often, what was worked on, and how the streak is holding up. That is useful for habit and accountability, but it does not answer the question every pianist eventually faces: "If someone asked me to play right now, what could I actually play?" The Pract.is guide on what a repertoire is and how pianists build one argues that real repertoire means readiness, not ownership, and readiness has to be tracked at the level of individual pieces, not at the level of total minutes.

A repertoire tracker, done well, is a small database with opinions. Each piece is an object with state. It has a status — being learned, polished, performance-ready, dormant, or retired. It has a history — when it was last played, what tempo it survives, what sections still fail. It has notes — fingering questions, memory cues, recording impressions, the bar where the rubato never quite lands. The minutes spent on the piece are useful, but they are not the point. The point is whether the piece exists, in playable form, at any given moment.

This is why most general practice apps fail as repertoire tools. They were built to log activity, not to manage music. A roundup like the broader Pract.is guide to piano practice tracker apps covers the wider category. This article is the narrower view — the apps where pieces, not sessions, are the first-class citizens.

What a real repertoire tracker needs to do

Before naming apps, it is worth fixing the criteria. Most pianists shopping for one of these tools have never been told what to look for, which is why so many end up using a notes app, a spreadsheet, or nothing at all. The five capabilities below are the floor. Anything missing a few of them will fail under real repertoire load — somewhere between fifteen and forty pieces, depending on level.

Bonus capabilities — section-level tracking, tempo ceilings, MIDI capture, score linking, teacher visibility — are what separate the better tools from the merely adequate ones. They matter mostly once the basic five are in place.

Four kinds of app, only one of which is actually a repertoire tracker

The market is more confusing than it looks because four very different product types all claim to "track your pieces." It is worth naming them, because they involve different trade-offs and most readers will end up using two together rather than one alone.

Mixing categories is fine and often necessary. A serious classical pianist might use forScore as the score reader, Cadenso as the status board, and a notes file for performance impressions. A working adult learner might pair Pract.is for session patterns with the same Cadenso shelf for piece state. The mistake is expecting a single app to do all four jobs equally well. None do, yet.

Cadenso: the cleanest repertoire-first product right now

If a single app most directly answers the prompt of this article, it is Cadenso. Its public copy is explicit in a way most competitors are not. Pieces are marked "Learning," "Learned," or "Mastered." The library understands "active, dormant, or next" as parallel categories. Practice sessions are tagged by piece, type — technique, repertoire, sight-reading — and difficulty. Per-piece and per-session notes are first-class. A built-in database of composers and works means a pianist does not have to type "Chopin – Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 9 No. 2" by hand for the hundredth time.

The status vocabulary is the differentiator. Most tools force users to build their own labeling system out of tags and folders, which sounds flexible until you realize that taxonomy is part of the work pianists do not want to do. Cadenso has already decided that "Learning / Learned / Mastered" plus "active / dormant / next" is the right matrix, and that decision is doing real work — it makes the tracker opinionated enough to be useful on day one.

There are honest caveats. The product describes itself as being in its founding period, with free access to all premium features for early users. That is good for the reader's wallet and bad for predicting what the product looks like in two years. There is also no native iOS or Android app from a marketing-page check; the product is mobile-friendly web. For pianists who want a status board they can open quickly from anywhere, that is acceptable. For pianists who expect notifications, offline mode, or watchOS integration, it may not be.

Key Passage: classical-piano DNA for students and teachers

The other product whose entire reason for existing is repertoire is Key Passage. Its tagline talks about a living record of every piece learned, every session practiced, and every composer explored, and the framing is unmistakably classical-piano. The product also describes itself as designed to make student practice visible to teachers without becoming surveillance — a tone that matters for studios where weekly check-ins and shared piece history are the operating model.

The piece, session, and composer entities are the spine of the product, which is the right design for serious classical work. A piano student preparing ABRSM grades, RCM Celebration Series levels, or an audition program tends to live inside a small graded repertoire pool that needs to be tracked across months. Key Passage is built for that worldview rather than the casual "I play three songs at parties" use case. It pairs naturally with the Pract.is article on keeping a piece alive after you've learned it, since most of the work it surfaces happens after the first performance.

The caveat is maturity. Key Passage is a younger product, and at the time of writing some of its public pages were not freely crawlable, which makes it harder to verify the full feature list from outside. Anyone considering it as a serious repertoire home should sign up for a trial and check whether status labels, last-played dates, and per-piece notes line up with their workflow before committing.

Pract.is, PianoJournal, and Modacity: piece-aware practice trackers

The second category is practice trackers that take pieces seriously without making status their entire identity. Pract.is belongs here with disclosure that it is our product. Its design assumption is that pianists already have many pieces in motion — one in active repair, one being polished, several being maintained — and a tracker should surface patterns across that workload rather than just totals. The session, piece, goal, note, and recording are the unit of work. The Android build is available on Google Play.

The honest position is that Pract.is does not yet ship a "Learning / Mastered" label system in the way Cadenso does. What it does well is the analytics layer over time: how a piece's tempo ceiling moved, how a passage's notes changed over the last month, whether technique and repertoire are in balance, which pieces have not been touched in weeks. That can substitute for explicit status in many workflows, especially for adult learners who care more about patterns than badges. Pianists who want both can use Pract.is for the session and history layer and Cadenso for the explicit status layer; the two are not exclusive.

PianoJournal goes a different direction by tying tracking to MIDI capture from a digital keyboard. Its public page describes automatic MIDI recording of performances, multi-activity sessions covering pieces, scales, sight-reading, and theory, and personalized recommendations based on practice history. Pricing is fully free with no subscription. For pianists practicing on a digital piano who want their tracker to ingest something more than typed notes, PianoJournal is the most generous tool in the category. The trade-off is that repertoire status, as a labeled concept, is not advertised; pieces accumulate history but do not carry explicit shelf labels.

Modacity is the longest-running entry. Its iOS and Android apps offer practice playlists, folders, tags, filters, expanded statistics, per-piece notes, and unlimited audio recording on the subscription tier, with a free tier that limits notes to one per piece. The repertoire dimension is handled through playlists, star ratings, and folders rather than a status label, which is why many users build personal conventions like an "A-list" folder for performance-ready pieces. Pricing is approximately $12.99 per month or $129 per year on Apple's storefront. The strength here is the practice cockpit: metronome, tuner, recordings, and tagging in one place. The weakness, for this article, is that repertoire state is implicit rather than explicit.

forScore and Newzik: score readers with serious metadata

Then there is the iPad-first world of score readers. forScore is the most ambitious tool in this category and quietly one of the best repertoire trackers in existence — if you are willing to build the system yourself. Every score carries metadata fields for title, rating, difficulty, reference, duration, tempo, key, multiple composers, genres, tags, and labels. The labels feature is the under-rated one: you can define your own categories — "Performance Ready," "Dormant," "Audition Set" — and tag pieces accordingly, then filter the library on those labels in seconds. forScore also tracks practice time per score natively and supports setlists for performances and lessons.

The price is reasonable for what it gives: a paid base app on iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, with an optional forScore Pro subscription that starts around $14.99 per year for the more advanced features. The trade-off is that forScore is not opinionated about repertoire — it is a powerful library system that lets you express any taxonomy you can imagine, including a sloppy one. Pianists who hate setting up systems will resist it. Pianists who already enjoy organizing scores will find it surprisingly effective as a status board.

Newzik covers similar ground with a slightly different philosophy: a strong cross-platform sync story, a focus on collaboration and setlists, and lifetime-purchase pricing options that some readers will prefer to a subscription. Like forScore, Newzik treats pieces as a library to be organized rather than a database of statuses. If repertoire management means knowing where a score lives, which setlist it belongs to, and how to bring it up under stage lights, both of these tools do real work. If repertoire management means knowing which pieces are still playable today, you will be doing the bookkeeping by hand on top of whatever the app gives you.

Capability matrix: which apps actually track repertoire status

The table below scores the apps against the five criteria above. It is intentionally narrow. An app might be excellent for other things and still fall short here, which is the point: most music software is not actually trying to be a repertoire tracker, even when its marketing implies otherwise.

App	Piece as object	Explicit status	Last-played visible	Per-piece notes	Filter & group
Cadenso	Yes	Yes (Learning / Learned / Mastered)	Yes	Yes	Yes (categories, difficulty)
Key Passage	Yes	Partial (status framing implied)	Yes	Yes	Yes (composer, piece)
Pract.is	Yes	No (status via patterns, not labels)	Yes (heatmap)	Yes	Yes (composer, tempo, neglect)
PianoJournal	Yes	No	Yes	Limited	Partial
Modacity	Yes	No (folders + star rating only)	Yes	Yes (unlimited on paid)	Yes (folders, tags)
forScore	Yes (score = piece)	DIY via Labels	Practice time only	Yes (annotations + fields)	Yes (labels, tags, genres)
Newzik	Yes (score = piece)	No native	No	Annotations only	Yes (setlists, versions)
Andante	Sessions by piece	No	Yes	Journal-style	Limited

The matching question, not the feature war

Pianists who buy software by feature list tend to end up with the wrong product. The better question is what kind of repertoire problem you are actually solving. Three failure modes are worth naming. The first is "I keep forgetting which pieces I learned" — usually solved by an explicit-status tool like Cadenso or Key Passage, because the missing artifact is a labeled inventory. The second is "my pieces feel decent but die on stage" — usually a session-and-recording problem more than a status problem, which puts Pract.is, Modacity, or PianoJournal in the lead. The third is "I am buried in scores and cannot find anything" — that is the forScore or Newzik problem, where what you really need is a library reader with smart filters.

None of the apps in this article force the problem in only one direction. But choosing one as a primary tool is much easier if you can name the failure first. The Pract.is article on using a practice log without turning it into homework covers the underlying habit problem in more detail; the lesson there applies to repertoire trackers too. The best tool is the one that survives your laziest week, not the one that looks best on its marketing page.

What none of these apps solve well

It would be dishonest to end without naming the gap. None of these tools have solved the hardest repertoire problem yet, which is the gap between "I have practiced this piece" and "I trust this piece under cold-start conditions." A status of "Mastered" or "Performance Ready" tends to be set when the pianist feels confident, not when the piece has been tested. The cognitive research on this is unforgiving. Roger Chaffin's work on expert memorization at the UConn Music Lab — built on his collaboration with pianist Gabriela Imreh — describes how serious players use formal structure and explicit performance cues as retrieval anchors, and how readiness has to be tested through interrupted retrieval, not through smooth run-throughs.

No piano app today walks the user through that kind of testing. The serious version of repertoire tracking would prompt the player periodically: start this piece cold at bar 33, record it, then update the status based on what survives. Until an app builds that loop, the status fields are partly aspirational. The Pract.is guide on memorizing music without making your playing fragile covers what the testing layer looks like by hand, and is worth pairing with whichever tool you choose.

That is also the honest case for why a hybrid setup is fine. A status board, a session log, a score reader, and an ear for cold tests will, between them, build a repertoire you can actually trust. One tool that does all four does not exist yet — and the pianist who waits for it will lose more pieces than the one who picks any two of these today and starts updating them weekly.

Hamelin can forget pieces. So can you. The point of a repertoire tracker is not to win against forgetting. It is to make sure the forgetting is a decision instead of a surprise.