Complete Rhythm Trainer vs music21

Complete Rhythm Trainer teaches users to read, recognize, tap, and write rhythms through progressive drills. Its 252 exercises are arranged across four levels and 30 chapters, including imitation, reading, dictation, and two-voice reading and dictation. Practice covers simple, compound, and asymmetric time signatures, as well as rhythmic values such as thirty-second notes, triplets, quintuplets, and swing eighths. The app includes 23 instrument sound banks made from recorded sounds, including piano, guitar, pizzicato violin, and percussion instruments. Users can create and save custom drills and build training programs to invite friends or students. Teacher and school features include classes, leaderboards, custom programs, app customization, and progress tracking; class programs can have up to 20 chapters and 20 drills per chapter. The first chapter of each mode is free. A one-time mobile unlock costs 6.99 USD; a Complete Music Trainer subscription costs €0.99 a month with a seven-day free trial and includes two other trainer apps. Lifetime access to the three-app bundle costs 19.99 EUR once. It runs on Android, iOS, web, Windows, and macOS.

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.