Complete Music Trainer vs music21

Complete Music Trainer brings ear training, rhythm work, and music reading practice together in one interface for computer screens. Ear training offers more than 150 progressive drills in 11 types, covering intervals, chords, scales, melodic dictations, and chord progressions. Rhythm practice includes 252 progressive drills across five types and a dedicated polyrhythm section. Music reading provides 270 drills over seven clefs, including key-signature and mixed-clef practice. Users can make and save their own drills and training programs, then invite friends or students to participate. Recorded instrument sounds include grand piano, with additional sound banks for training sections. The service runs on the web, Windows, and macOS and includes progress tracking, harmony tools, rhythm practice, and basic notation tools. There is no free plan; a seven-day trial requires no credit card. The monthly subscription is €0.99 a month, the yearly subscription is €9.99 a year, and lifetime access is 19.99 EUR as a one-time payment. A free teacher account and Teacher Companion App support school-specific features, students, and licenses.

music21 is a free Python toolkit for computer-aided musicology, used to study music datasets, teach music theory, edit notation, analyze music, generate examples, and compose. It includes a corpus of thousands of encoded works, plus tools for searching that corpus, plotting pitch, and performing advanced analysis such as nPVI. The toolkit works with MIDI and MusicXML and can be extended to handle other formats. Its documentation recommends MuseScore for viewing and editing notation, and describes MusicXML readers including Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico. Optional integrations include LilyPond, Matplotlib, SciPy, PyAudio, and Pygame; music21 can also be used in web-based Jupyter Notebook. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with web use through Jupyter. The toolkit is BSD-licensed and costs nothing. Some corpus works have separate license restrictions. Users need some familiarity with Python, and music21 works primarily with symbolic music data rather than sound waves; it cannot read notation directly from images or PDFs.