Andante - Music Practice Journal for iPhone

Overview

Andante is a music practice journal to help musicians achieve calm, focused practice. I released Andante in Fall 2020 and it now has over 11,000 downloads and is rated 4.9 stars with over 600 reviews. Check it out on the app store or see the marketing website.

I started working on Andante in early 2018, and it started as a simple timer to track my violin practice time. Over time, as I grew as both a programmer and designer, I improved upon the app by adding more features and improving the UI. As I became a more competent Swift developer and understood more about software architecture, I even ended up restarting the project from scratch a few times.

Before releasing the app to the public, I used TestFlight to give the app to both my musician friends and people I didn’t know to try to get a lot of user feedback and testing.

Features

• Log practice sessions live or manually, including inputting mood and focus and comments
• Practice tools: audio recording, metronome, timer, drone tuner
• Daily goals
• Charts and data visualizations
• Practice reminders/notifications
• Journal with rich text and folders
• Multiple profiles
• iCloud Sync
• Home Screen Widgets
• Siri Shortcuts

Challenges

The biggest challenge I faced was designing the app from the ground up. I wanted the app to have a design that evoked calm and focused practice, but I also wanted the app to look clean and professional. It took many iterations to finally land at its current state, which I’m really happy with.

Another challenge was some of the complex UI programming. There are some features in the app like pulling down on a practice session to collapse the session into a bar above the Tab Bar so you can access the rest of the app. All the animations and infrastructure for that kind of interaction was challenging to set up cleanly.

Audio Recording was also a difficult problem. I want the user to be able to tap to record, tap to pause recording, and then have the option of playing back the recording or adding to it. Apple’s Voice Memos app achieves this very well, so I used it as inspiration. I ended up using a system of recording ‘chunks,’ which can be played back seamlessly with a visual that appears uninterrupted, and can be exported as one file.