iReal Pro - Music Book & Backing Tracks
4 | 612 ratings
Price: 21.99
Last update: 01-19-2026
Top reviews from the United States
- David TLove itgreat for jazz players and singers
- Dave BediniUsable as a practice or performance device.OK, this app isn't perfect, but it's very useful. You can download thousands of songs from their forums, you can change keys effortlessly, you can also edit arrangements to your taste, as well as enter songs yourself. It can take a little time to figure out its oddities, but with some work, you can probably figure it out easier than I did. I have it on my desktop, with some good speakers, to use for practicing leads, and on my tablet, where I can take a line to my PA, and have a backing band for my solo act. You can adjust tempo, as well as the balance of instruments, to suit your preference. I find it useful.
- hcappyA Muscian's DreamI bought the Real Fake book years ago and didn't use it too much because I just wasn't ready for it. Someone recommended the iReal app to me recently in our Big Band and I love it. There are thousands of tracks you can download in various styles and you can write your own. You can change the tempo, key and style. It's great for developing a solo and it has a lot of features I may never use but like to see. HIghly recommended
- Urban AchieverGreat app for casual gigs and jazz standardsI played a casual gig for the first time in many *many* years on New Year's Eve (just for fun). Needless to say, I was expecting to be very rusty, and would not have remembered all of the chord changes, etc. to all of the jazz standards that I used to play regularly as a kid. I was also expecting my on-the-fly transposition skills to be rusty, which *could* have been an issue since I am a horn player and since we were playing with a vocalist who wouldn't necessarily have wanted to play those tunes in their original keys (basically rendering my fake books useless for the evening).
This app is great. For the Gen-X'ers who started playing jazz in the 90's and maybe even had a few practice tools on their old DOS/Windows PC's, it reminds me of a touch-screen/on-the-go combination of Band-in-a-Box and Encore. I was able to easily create playlists of all of the tunes in the set list, in the keys that the vocalist had selected, and using the global transposition function to convert all of the charts from C to Bb (for tenor sax, trumpet, etc.). I didn't spend a lot of time using the built-in accompaniment function, but I expect it too will be very useful (when my device is plugged into external speakers) for practicing chord changes on-the-go. - bixI do not have a device this app is compatable with, and I can't find out our to get a refundA friend has this app on his smart phone and I was so impressed I asked him to help me put it on my computer. When he opened it up, it put it on a Kindle I own, but it is in another states, and it didn't come up on that one either. This is probably a great tool for musicians, but I can't use it, or open it. It was just $23 and some change I cannot get back.
- Shawn G. GrahamSo Useful For Jazz MusiciansThe useful aspects are 1) many songs that can be downloaded easily from the forum 2) wide range of tempos 3) ability to cut out an instrument 4) change keys, 5) change style of backing (med. swing, bossa or whatever) and many more.
The teaching mode is very useful. It can be programmed to increase the tempo by a specified amount every chorus. It can also be programmed to change the key by a specified interval every chorus. I personally like the tempo feature for practicing a head starting off slowly and speeding up.
One problem is that if you want to learn the head of the tune, you need to have the music from somewhere else. I can't think of any way for iReal b to solve this problem. Another small nit is that there is no Windows version. I bought an android tablet for the purpose of using iReal b. If there was a Windows version I would have used my laptop. The advantage of the tablet I bought (Samsung Galaxy 2 tab 7") is that it is easy to carry around. And I can just put it on the music stand.
I have only been using it for a couple of days. There are many features I have yet to discover and utilize. I don't think you will be disappointed. - His Wifethis product is incompleteI don't spend most of my time trying to read chords from an Android device. I don't use a tablet, only a smartphone, so the chords appear too small for my eyes. I practice in front of a large screen with speakers at my desktop (I use a laptop with monitor and keyboard plugged in.) There is no accommodation for desktop use, so this does not work well for me.
Also, there should be a way to upload that does not look like a blog. In order to download chords and music, I have to look for someone's conversation, and incidentally there's some music there. Not a logical format. Create a distinct music upload section. - T. MorganUtility makes up for any UI shortcomingsAround town early adopters of iRealb on the iPad loved it and started bringing them to jams and shows. Then the 200 dollar Fire came out, and there is unanimous agreement that it is superior in nearly all regards for the iRealb application. The largest being the size reduction. The Kindle size is perfect for a music stand or a small table corner. It takes up way less space, is much easier to carry and brings the same feature set (if there are critical differences between iOS IRB and Android IRB, I have not faced them) as other platforms. Any smaller and it would be too small for reading music charts.
The user interface is not overly intuitive and takes some time to understand. But once you've authored a handful of charts, it becomes nicely manageable. The ability to share files is limited to posting and downloading from the forum or sending email links. This works and it's how we share tunes between our group. But it's also cumbersome, poorly conceived and a bit odd in this age of cloud computing and service-based data applications. I think a plug-in architecture addition would be wonderful. Then I could code a DropBox component that automatically syncs tunes/changes/playlists for all members of my group.
I also think this app should be open source (again, so I could contribute features to it), but I won't blame the fellow for wanting to make a living.
The systemic shortcomings aside, there's just too much value to be had to not give this application a strong rating. I've gained a great deal from it.