Skip to content
Music Buddy
Music Buddy logo — a friendly golden retriever as an orchestra conductor

Music Buddy

Join the Thousands of Musicians and Teachers Using Music Buddy to Practice, Learn and Compose Music in One, Powerful Tool

Track splitter for karaoke and practice (vocals, drums, bass, and more), lead sheet editor, sight reading, play-along player, audio analysis, lesson plans, scales & arpeggios, metronome, tuner, and ABC notation. No install. No ads.

What you can do

Deep practice tools in one place—notation, play-along, stems, and analysis—for musicians and teachers on every instrument.

Lead sheet & notation editor

Create and edit music notation with chords, melody, tablature, dynamics, and print-friendly layouts. Ideal for lead sheets and practice charts.

Open the editor →

Song player & mixer

Play along with multi-track layouts, mute and solo parts, adjust levels, and follow the score with synchronized highlighting.

Open the player →

Audio analyzer

Upload MP3 or WAV files to explore tempo, structure, and harmonic content to help you learn songs and build lead sheets.

Try audio analysis →

Track splitter & stems

Separate vocals, drums, bass, and other parts from a full mix—mute or solo stems for karaoke-style practice, a cleaner backing track, or isolating the line you are working on.

Open Song Doctor →

Lessons & learning

Study built-in lesson material, author your own lesson plans, embed notation, print, and share with students or bandmates.

Go to Learn →

Scales & arpeggios

Generate scale and arpeggio exercises from progressions and patterns, with rhythm options and playback matched to the editor engine.

Practice scales →

Metronome

Stay in time with subdivisions and built-in rhythm patterns for practice and rehearsal.

Open metronome →

Tuner

Tune with a chromatic tuner using your mic—quick checks before practice or a gig.

Open tuner →

ABC notation

Paste ABC to preview, play, and save tunes and exercises—handy for folk, trad, and quick charts.

Open ABC →

How it works

  1. 1

    Open the app

    Use any modern browser—nothing to install.

  2. 2

    Browse or create

    Import MusicXML, build charts in the editor, or pull from your local library.

  3. 3

    Practice & improve

    Play, split tracks for karaoke or focused practice, analyze audio, drill scales, and keep everything on your device.

Why Music Buddy

  • 100% free — no paywall, no ads.
  • Local-first library — songs and lessons in IndexedDB; keep working offline after load.
  • Browser-based — no desktop install.
  • Share via links — send encoded links to import songs, exercises, and lessons.
  • Stem splitting — practice with vocals, drums, bass, and other parts on separate tracks.
  • MusicXML & more — bring charts from other tools.
  • ABC notation — folk and traditional tunes in one paste.
  • Audio analysis — explore tempo, structure, and harmony from recordings to learn songs and sketch charts faster.
  • Community forum — ask questions, share tips, and discuss features with other musicians on Discourse.

Music Buddy News

Release Highlights

v2.1.7

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a playback form bug in the editor and Play features
  • Note highlights duration playback now matches the note duration
  • Sharing by email now sends clickable links to the shared items
  • Added a setlist sharing feature to the library
v2.1.5

Bug Fixes & Harmonic Slash Analysis

  • Fixed a key transpose bug in the editor
  • Added harmonic slash analysis to the Editor and Play features and scales and arpeggios teacher
  • Added tempo ramping to the metronome
  • Better persistance of configuration on analyze feature
  • Removed links for Effendi Jazz Repo that are not in public domain
v2.1.4

Scales & Arpeggios: Transposing octaves up or down feature added

  • Up/Down arrows added to the scale and arpeggio teacher to transpose the exercise up or down by one octave
  • Speed ramping on the looping analyzer no longer stops when speed reaches 1.0 (full speed)
  • Improvements to the musicxml importer and parser to handle more complex musicxml files
  • Added feature to mute melody and harmony on scales and arpeggios teacher
  • Some minor UI cleanup on Scales and Arpeggios teacher
  • Cleaned up display of related scales/modes in modal popups in scales and arpeggios teacher
  • Improvements and new features on the Editor
  • Added 'solo sections' feature to playback, so you can take a few choruses to solo
  • Added auto scrolling to the playback feature so the score scrolls as you play
  • Like with scales and arpeggios, in playback you can now highlight (shift-click) measures to loop them
v2.1.3

Scales & Arpeggios: More songs, more modes, more practice

  • Added more songs to the Effendi Jazz Repo and cleaned up song names
  • Made some adjustments to the pattern generator in Scales & Arpeggios to make it more intuitive
v2.1.2

Exercise transposition now supported in scales and arpeggios

  • Exercise transposition now supported in scales and arpeggios
  • Added timer for time spent on learning songs with the analyzer goal
  • Added 'high fidelity' option to the analyzer to improve the fidelity of time stretching
  • Fixed bugs on goal planning/tracking page
  • Created new facebook group for Music Buddy at https://www.facebook.com/groups/musicbuddy
v2.1.1

Bug fixes, select individual modes in Scales & Arpeggios

  • Persist analysis data between sessions in Song Doctor/Analyzer
  • Select individual modes in Scales & Arpeggios
  • Better editor for creating custom scale patterns in Scales & Arpeggios
  • More logical application of chords, chord functions, and chord qualities in Scales & Arpeggios
  • Misc bug fixes and improvements
v2.1.0

Practice Goals: weekly targets, streaks, and gentle accountability

  • Added a new Practice Goals page with a weekly progress tracker, goal cards, and a timer for goal tracking
  • Misc bug fixes and improvements
v2.0.9

Song Doctor: Melody modal fixes

  • Added guitar tablature to the melody modal
  • Added measure copy/paste to the editor - shift+click to select a measure, then ctrl+c to copy, then shift+click to select a measure to paste into, then ctrl+v to paste
  • Fixed a bug where the melody modal would not show the correct tempo
v2.0.8

Song Doctor: Melody modal—TAB and clearer tempo

  • Melody popup: tempo (BPM) number field uses a smaller font so values like 140 stay fully visible
  • Melody popup: optional guitar TAB with the same position selector pattern as Scales & Arpeggios
v2.0.7

Score Editor improvements & bug fixes

  • Drag note animation
  • Chord harmony suggestions for notes in a measure
v2.0.6

Melody extraction improvements

  • Improved melody extraction accuracy and reliability
  • Added two new video tutorials for Song Doctor
  • Improved the frequency grid in the Song Doctor analysis
v2.0.5

Scales & Arpeggios: Focus your practice on the measures that matter

  • Click any measure in the Scale and Arpeggio Teacher to build a custom practice loop in seconds
  • Mix and match non-adjacent measures so you can isolate tricky changes without rewriting the exercise
  • Start playback with selected measures to hear only your focused loop, or leave nothing selected to play the full exercise as usual
  • Selected measures are highlighted clearly, making it easy to see exactly what you are drilling before you press play
v2.0.4

Tutorials tab is live + smoother first-time song loading in Play

  • Replaced the Help tab with a new Tutorials tab that plays YouTube videos directly inside Music Buddy
  • Added a tutorials index so new videos can be added in one place without changing app code
  • Added the first tutorial video: Music Buddy Overview
  • Fixed a Play page issue where the first imported song from Effendi Jazz Repo could show the previous song instead of the newly downloaded one
  • Improved song selector behavior so already-downloaded repository songs open with the correct saved song
v2.0.3

Bring scores in from anywhere—meter, rhythm, and staves stay true

  • Fixed a printing bug
  • Fixed a musicxml import bug
  • Fixed bug related to showing beat counts in scales and arpeggios teacher mode
  • Added links to additional musicxml files on 'Effendi Jazz Repo'
v2.0.2

Printing that lands on your music—not the homepage

  • Print Score and Print Lesson open the actual sheet or lesson view, so you get clean notation instead of accidentally printing the welcome page
  • Printed lessons show the right lesson link when you file or share a paper copy
v2.0.1

Scales & Arpeggios: Explore every mode on the fretboard

  • Select the scale name below each measure and get popup showing all the modes of the scale. Click the mode name to see the scale diagram and the chords in that mode.
  • Toggle beat counting on/off to show the beat count below each measure.
  • Fixed a bug to ensure each measure is properly filled with notes.
  • Added support for different time signatures and subdivisions to scale and arpeggio exercises.
v2.0.0

Analyze: Split tracks in the browser—then extract, blend, and export

  • Isolate vocals, drums, bass, and more into separate tracks—right in your browser, on your machine, with nothing uploaded
  • Solo, mute, and A/B each track with its own waveform so you can really hear what the analysis is listening to
  • Export any isolated track to MP3 when you want files for the rest of your toolkit
  • Zero in on the section you care about: your loop becomes the new song—trimmed, freshly analyzed, and ready before you split into individual tracks
  • Build your own mix from the tracks you choose—then export a polished MP3 you can share or drop into any workflow
  • Hear the analysis match your ears: run chord and melody detection on exactly the blend you created so the timeline reflects your custom mix
  • A sharper, more musical view—waveforms, measure markers, and chord rows now line up perfectly, even right after you extract a passage
  • We’ll let you know before a heavy split on a slower device so you’re never surprised by the wait
v1.6.0

Scales & Arpeggios: Richer Patterns & Musical Phrases

  • Build more interesting lines with an advance sequence: mix forward and backward steps (like “two up, one back”) instead of a single repeating stride
  • New pattern flavors: broken triads, wave shapes, lower neighbors, pentatonic runs, guide tones (smooth 3rds and 7ths over changes), and more
  • Optional reverse of any pattern so you hear the same idea upside down
  • Target specific beats for chord tones, with several ways to approach them—from a simple snap to chromatic, scale-wise, or classic enclosure figures
  • Pattern menu items now show a quick hint of what each shape does, so you can explore without guessing
  • Sprinkle in genre-style licks: turn up “Idioms” and the teacher weaves short jazz, blues, rock, pop, Latin, and country phrases into your exercise, matched to the genre you picked for chords
  • Guide tones and target-beat options work together so practice stays musical, not just mechanical
v1.5.0

Scales & Arpeggios: Guitar Tab + Chord Toggles

  • Scales & arpeggios: guitar tablature toggle with fretboard position selector
  • Scales & arpeggios: chord symbols toggle moved to control panel for quick access
  • Corrected a bug with how accidentals are used in a single measure
  • Default direction for scales is now 'Both'

Community

Music Buddy community

Ask questions, request features, share tips, and meet other musicians on our forum or Facebook group.