A free music practice tracker that keeps your log

Why "free" can be an honest answer here

A practice tracker is a timer, a list and some arithmetic. In practicebook all three run in your browser, and your log is stored on your own device rather than on a server of ours. That means one more person using it costs us essentially nothing beyond hosting we already pay for, so there is nothing to recover with a subscription.

That is also the test to apply to any free tracker: ask what it costs the people who built it to carry you. If the answer is "a server, a database, a sync service and a support inbox", free is a stage rather than a promise, and the squeeze arrives later — usually at the export, because that is the moment you most need to say yes.

What a practice tracker actually has to do

Strip away the decoration and the job is small:

Count the minutes per thing. Not per session, per thing. Adult amateurs and students work on several pieces, studies and scales at once, and "I practised ninety minutes" is far less useful than "forty of it went on the Chopin and almost none on scales, again".

Survive real life. A timer that loses its count when the screen locks or the tab goes to the background is not a timer. practicebook stores the moment a session started and subtracts, so a phone in your pocket for forty minutes comes back with forty minutes on it.

Let one line of context in. "Left hand still rushes bar 12" is the sentence that makes last month's numbers worth reading. It should be optional and it should take one line, not a form.

Hand the whole thing back on request. See below.

The export is the part that matters in ten years

Everything else is convenience; this is the bit that decides whether your practice history outlives the app holding it. practicebook exports two files, both built in your browser and neither of them sent anywhere: a Markdown file you can read with your own eyes, and a CSV with one row per session — session id, piece, start, end, seconds, minutes and your note.

The CSV is also what comes back in. Import merges it with whatever is already in the log and matches on the session id, so importing the same file twice changes nothing and pulling last year's file in beside this year's costs you neither half. That round trip is the difference between an export and a souvenir.

Three things to check before you commit a year to any tracker

1. Export the first day, not the last. Log one session, press export, and open the file. If what comes out is a PDF of a chart rather than your sessions as rows, the data is not really yours.

2. Try the import. An export you cannot put back is a one-way door.

3. Put your phone in your pocket mid-session. Lock the screen, wait five minutes, come back. If the clock lost those minutes it will lose them every evening.

What practicebook deliberately does not do

There are no streaks, no badges and no leaderboards. They measure attendance rather than practice, and a streak quietly punishes you for being ill or busy — which is exactly the week you least need a red mark.

There is no account, so there is also no sync: your log lives on the device you made it on, and it travels as a file you export. And there is no teacher-facing side. If you teach and need lessons, invoices and who has paid, that is a different tool for a different person.