Learning music shouldn’t depend on what you can pay.

How it started

Every piano app we found cost over $100 a year, and only let you play the songs it had chosen for you. For a lot of people that price ends the conversation: the keyboard ends up in a corner, and the music stays on paper.

So we started building the app we wished existed: one that is free, and that works with any sheet music. The first prototype ran in a web browser in August 2026. Five hundred revisions later, it is Piano Libre: libre as in free to use, and free to play whatever you want.

What we’ve built

• Your own sheet musicOpen a MusicXML or MIDI file, and the app plays it, scrolls it and shows every note on the keyboard.
• Practice the way a teacher would make youIt waits for the right note, loops the hard bars, slows down and lets you take one hand at a time. With a MIDI keyboard, it scores every note.
• A library of nearly 1,500 scoresAll in the public domain, from Bach and Clementi to the art songs of the OpenScore Lieder corpus.
• Courses built on six skillsReading, rhythm, technique, hand coordination, harmony and expression: 58 competencies, taught with short video lessons.
• Five languagesEnglish, Portuguese, Spanish, French and German.
• Private by designYour practice stays on your device. Usage data is off unless you turn it on.

What’s coming

• Play on any piano, through the microphoneNo MIDI keyboard and no cables: the app listens to your acoustic piano and waits for the right note. It is in testing now.
• Turn a PDF into a score you can practiceOptical music recognition reads the printed page and turns it into a score that plays, scrolls and waits for you. Also in testing.
• iPhone, iPad and Android appsThe same Piano Libre, in the App Store and on Google Play.

Our goals

1. Free piano lessons for everyoneToday everything in Piano Libre is free: the practice tools, the library and the courses. Our goal is that no one is kept from learning music by its price.
2. Reach people who never had a teacherMusic changes how children and adults listen, focus and keep at something hard, and private lessons are out of reach for most of the world. Piano Libre runs in a browser, on the devices people already own, in five languages, and with the microphone it will work with the piano already in the house.
3. Work with teachers, not around themA teacher can send the score from today’s lesson, and the student practices exactly that piece at home, at their own speed.
4. Grow without breaking trustWe say only what the app actually does, and we keep your practice on your device.

Where we are

• August 2026The first prototype plays a score in the browser.
• September 2026The app gets its name: Piano Libre.
• October 2026Public launch on the web, at pianolibre.app.
• Coming soonPractice through the microphone, PDF import, and the iPhone, iPad and Android apps.