There's no shortage of "ear training app" results when you search — most of them are the same fixed drill bank with a different coat of paint. We went through five that are actually worth your time, looked at what each one is built on, and ranked them honestly. Guess The Chords lands at #2 — not because we're grading our own homework, but because the app ahead of us earns it, and the gap below us is real too.
1. Chet — Ear Training
Platform: iOS only. Price: Free.
What it's built on: multiple-choice theory drills plus a "call & response" mode where you play the answer back yourself on a virtual (or MIDI-connected) piano, guitar or bass, inside guided learning paths.
Main features: a library covering intervals, scales, arpeggios, chords, progressions, and tonal/atonal sequences; professionally recorded audio across jazz, classical and pop (not synthesized tones); challenge games with global leaderboards, including skill-tiered leagues added to its Daily Challenge in 2025; a spaced-repetition practice mode.
Why it's #1 here: real recorded performances, a genuinely competitive framing, and it's completely free. If your top priority is broad, high-quality ear training on iOS at zero cost, Chet earns the top spot.
Where it stops short: no Android version, so half the world's musicians can't use it. Its "competition" is an asynchronous daily-challenge leaderboard — you're compared to a number, not playing against a person in real time. And its recorded-music library is fixed; it doesn't grow from what its own users bring to it.
2. Guess The Chords
Platform: iOS + Android. Price: Free, with a Premium tier.
What it's built on: real-time 1v1 PvP. Two musicians hear the same chord progression at the same time and race to name it first — an actual opponent, not a leaderboard number from yesterday.
Main features:
- A chord and music-theory database that keeps expanding as music theory itself advances year over year — the content pool isn't frozen at launch, it grows.
- Real-time PvP battles built on music generated across jazz, bossa nova, pop, folklore, rock and classical — not a single fixed genre or a static recorded library.
- Nine distinct daily training activities — adaptive chord identification, chord-kind recognition, progression and cadence training, roman-numeral ear training, and more — all steered by one adaptive engine that recalibrates to each player individually, so no two players get the same session.
- Submit-your-own-music (Premium): your song's real progression joins the shared training and PvP pool, with an in-match attribution card crediting you and linking out to your track.
- A chord-scanning tool that reads sheet music/chord charts, and MIDI export of training sessions straight into a DAW — a production-side toolset most ear trainers simply don't have.
Where we're still catching up: our in-match audio is generated rather than professionally recorded live performances — Chet's library has us beat there today. That's the honest trade-off for training across six genres worth of freshly generated, never-repeating material instead of a fixed recorded set.
3. EarMaster — Music Theory
Platform: iOS, macOS/Windows, plus a Cloud Edition for schools and choirs. Price: free tier limited to 4 beginner modules; $5.99/mo or $43.80/yr for full access.
What it's built on: a large, structured curriculum — thousands of lessons across melody, rhythm, intervals, chords, solfège and sight-singing, with microphone input for voice/clap recognition and MIDI input.
Main features: institutional tools (access codes, admin dashboards) built for classrooms and choirs, and sync across every platform.
Best for: students and teachers who want a traditional, notation-first academic course rather than a game — and schools that need the institutional licensing layer nobody else on this list offers.
4. Perfect Ear: Music & Rhythm
Platform: iOS + Android, 5M+ downloads. Price: free, with à la carte in-app purchases (Premium $14.99, exercise packs from $0.99).
What it's built on: a very large bank of discrete multiple-choice drills — intervals, scales, and chords (introduction, identification, inversions, progressions, chord reading), plus rhythm drills and theory articles.
Best for: sheer content volume for almost nothing, and it shows in the install base. The trade-off, per user reviews, is a less polished interface and no real-time feedback while you're actually practicing.
5. Complete Ear Trainer
Platform: iOS, Android, Huawei AppGallery, Amazon, plus a browser version. Price: one-time $6.99, no subscription, ever.
What it's built on: 11 drill types spanning 24 intervals, 36 chord types, 28 scales, and melodic-dictation and chord-progression drills — 150+ drills in a structured "Classic" mode, plus an Arcade mode.
Main features: custom drill creation and private leaderboards, aimed at teachers running their own students through it.
Best for: anyone who'd rather pay once and own it forever. It's fully asynchronous, though — no live opponent, no chord scanning, no MIDI export.
So, which one?
If you want free and professionally recorded audio, Chet is the real deal. If you want a traditional academic course, EarMaster. If you want the most content for the least money, Perfect Ear or Complete Ear Trainer. But if what you actually want is to compete — to hear a progression at the same instant as another musician and beat them to naming it, across genres, with a theory database that keeps growing instead of standing still — that's the one thing none of the other four do, and it's the whole reason Guess The Chords exists.
