Hi there. I am about to launch a new web app called Tuneshare (Tuneshare .co.uk), a place for musicians to manage and share their repertoire. It goes live on 01/10/2026.
One of my testers mention Anki so I came searching. This looks so useful and I’m wondering if there is a way that I could enable my users to export their tune / song lists into the Anki ecosystem.
Thanks in advance,
Keith
That doesn’t require any special integration. If you teach your app to generate plain text/CSV files in the proper format – Text Files - Anki Manual – users will be able to import them. That link also explains how to incorporate media with your export.
But something to consider – Anki, like all spaced-repetition apps, is designed for memorization.
While Anki’s scheduling algorithm(s) can probably be adapted for practice scheduling – which seems to be what your users could be interested in – that will take a good deal of effort on a user’s part. And I say “probably” because I don’t think there’s been much research in the spaced-repetition field regarding what sort of scheduling would be appropriate for that. It’s uncharted territory.
To the extent your users are interested in Anki for memorization, they will still need to adapt a piece of music into a format suitable for spaced-repetition studying. Look at tools like the Lyrics and Poetry Cloze Generator for ideas about what it would take to do that.
Adding to Danika’s answer, 2 things that’ll save you time when you build the export.
Anki 2.1.54+ reads headers at the top of the file, so you can preset the import dialog instead of making users configure it:
#separator:tab
#html:true
#notetype:Basic
#deck:Tuneshare
#tags:tuneshare
#columns:Front Back
Tune name Key, composer, notes
#notetype and #deck only preset things that already exist in the user’s collection. Otherwise the user just picks them in the dialog.
Anki uses the first field to decide whether a note already exists, and by default a re-import updates the matching notes and keeps their review history. So keep the first field stable and a second export updates the deck instead of filling it with duplicates
Thanks Both!
That’s really helpful. I had hoped it would be something like that. I’m not sure what form it will take at the moment, it was just something that one of my testing team mentioned. They were in the process of manually setting up an Anki deck to help them remember the names of tunes they know (When you’re into trad tunes and the like, the tunes are only 32 bars long and you literally learn hundreds of them), and it occurred that exporting the list of tunes you want to remember would speed up that process immensely.
Cheers
Keith
I guess I wasn’t thinking expansively enough of the possible uses for musicians! That’s a good example of something that you could use spaced-repetition for – a 1-to-1 connection between 2 pieces of information, the title and “the song that goes …”