TraqFreq tracks playing Time, Songs, Sets, Passages, Sessions and Epics. Learn what these are and how they are displayed in the app.

TraqFreq is the first musical instrument activity tracker that monitors playing, climate and supplies.

TraqFreq is a small device that easily attaches on the inside or outside of your instrument. Once installed, it will automatically turn on and off and detect when and how long you play. The information is stored on the device and then later uploaded to your phone. Various charts and views of your playing data are available.

Never before has it been possible to automatically track when and how long you play, and to create an accurate and detailed playing log with no effort. Being able to also view this data with various charts opens up a new way to analyze your playing time. The uses are many and varied: study and evaluate your playing behavior, frequency and consistency; stay motivated and reach your goals as you progress; identify and regulate healthy lengths of practice and break time to recover from and/or prevent injuries; parents and teachers keep in touch with student progress as they learn to play musical instruments.

Let's look at some of the charts when tracking playing time.

Timeline chart

The timeline chart shows your playing time. You can pan back and forth and also choose a bar period of Day, Week or Month. The chart shows the time played above each bar. The lighter and darker region in each bar indicates the percentage of time spent playing during the daytime vs. nighttime. Each time you pick up your instrument and play, TraqFreq will accurately detect and compute your playing time and update the charts.

Summary view

A summary of your playing time is also available. Besides the totals for Today, this Week, and this Month, there are two additional values presented. The Inactive value shows the duration between now and the last time you played. This is useful for various scenarios: for motivation to play again soon, or as a means to know how much break is needed between playing sessions for recovery from injuries or prevention of injuries.

The Recent value shows the amount of time you just played, so if you just played for 32 minutes and picked up your phone, you'll see how much time you have just played compared with the total for today.

Calendar chart

A calendar chart is useful for seeing patterns in your playing duration and days of the week and month (the black dots in the Calendar indicate the start of the month). Darker regions indicate days of longer playing time totals for that day.

Histogram chart

In addition, a histogram of your playing time is available. In the chart above, we can see that, in the last 30 days, there were 10 days where we played about an hour a day.

Log view

A log view is also available showing each time you played your instrument. Each of these log entries can be selected to view more information about that entry.

Music Forms

Besides tracking your playing time, TraqFreq also tracks musical forms - that is, Passages, Songs, Sets and Epics. Playing time and musical forms are all musical activities that are tracked, and these are interpreted as follows:

1. Time is playing time
2. Passages are shorter than songs
3. Songs are longer than passages
4. Sets are collections of songs
5. Sessions are instances of play separated by recesses
6. Epics are overly extended songs or ranges of play

Note that TraqFreq does not recognize the actual song title that you are playing, nor compute a score of the music played. Instead, it tracks playing time and playing activities. Thus, Time and Sessions are the durations and moments of play, and Passages, Songs, Epics and Sets are the forms of music that a musician creates during those times. Here is where TraqFreq considers isolated passages and songs as distinctly separate. Then, several joined passages or one passage long enough are the general equivalent of one song. And numerous uninterrupted songs or one overly extended song are one epic. Further, a collection of individual songs is a set. A more technical description can be found in our guide.

Now let us see how these musical activities are displayed in the TraqFeq app. On the Tunes dashboard, each tab represents one of the musical activities described above. Each of the charts are updated to represent the musical activity (tab) selected. For instance, in the Tunes dashboard shown below, the Songs chart shows the number of songs played each day (or week or month). When the Time tab is selected, the chart will show the time played on each of the days (weeks, months). Thus, the chart shows the count of the musical form, or the time in minutes for the Time tab. The light and dark region within a bar indicates the percentage of that musical activity played during the daytime vs. night time.

The Calendar chart shows your playing patterns over a longer period of time for the selected tab. The histogram chart shows the distribution of Time played, Song lengths, or Set lengths, etc.

The Inactive tile shows how long ago you last played a Song, or a Set, or how long ago you last played (Time tab). The tiles also depict the change in value and percent over the period. So in the dashboard below, the number of songs played over the last month has decreased by 25%.

Tracking the various musical activities is relevant to musicians in several important respects:

• Progress - reflected in the quantity and frequency of playing time
• Content - as playing habits develop, so does musical material (Passages vs. Songs vs. Sets)
• Proficiency - sufficient playing duration leads to mastering the art and live performances
• Fitness - musical stamina and dexterity are greatly influenced by the length of playing time
• Health - unrealistic periods of play cause pain and aggravate existing physical conditions