Last updated on January 15th, 2026 at 05:25 pm
Rhythm Cat – Read Music – Education Game Review
Rhythm Cat – Read Music is a Education/Music game from James Uhart, first launched in 19th January 2013.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 70+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Rhythm Cat – Read Music Stand Out
More info and video presentation at http://melodycats.com
A fun game that will help students of all ages learn how to read some basic music rhythms.
60 entertaining levels that get progressively more challenging.
This game has been developed in collaboration with professional musicians and educators.
"This is an excellent app to recommend to your students/parents, or to use as part of your music lab if you have one. Students will learn to look ahead more as they tap these rhythms, and will learn the important skill of listening to themselves and others."
COLOR IN MY PIANO
colorinmypiano.com
…a place to exchange ideas and resources for piano teaching
This Education game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Rhythm Cat – Read Music is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 24th June 2022
Recent improvements include:
- Fixed timing issue
Download & Availability
Rhythm Cat – Read Music is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Rhythm Cat – Read Music on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
This game is so fun to play but not just for fun and it helps you to learn more about piano.
We use this with our piano students. Its challenging for them. Its more precise than most students can handle, so it challenges them to be deliberately precise in their tapping.
If you are making multiple attempts at a level and press restart repeatedly the ui and beat get out of sync and makes it impossible and frustrating to use. Loading in these situations needs to be timed properly.
Our students love these games up through level 2. But there are several games after level 3 that continue to saytry again despite playing it correctly. It would also be helpful to adjust tempos. We doubt if we could fully use this with our students.
We trying to play this game but dont really know what we need to do to pass a game. We have figured out that Im supposed to touch the note that will play it took us a few random tries to figure out that Im supposed to touch and hold on a note if its dotted, half or whole. But we do not kniw wha Im supposed to do with the rests. Am we supposed to touch them (to note we saw them and have counted) or am we supposed to NOT touch them and just count. We are on the fourth or fifth melody -and we cannot pass it -and we dont know why. We just keep playing it and trying -but the notes dont show us if Ive succeded with any of them or not and no indication that we missed something so dont kniw why Imm not passing this one. Its so early in the game Im not sure if theres a probelm with the aop itswlf or if we (with all our 60 years of music) actually dont u derstand rhythm and if thats true -glad to learn -now -here -but how? If we dont get any feedback that tells us what we need to do to get through this piece. An exercise in insanity.
Songs from level 1-3 onward are still misreading beats, even after update.
Everything past level 4 is simply a mess. The screen will not accept beats played correctly and will also not show mistakes like the first three levels. We downloaded this to help our beginning kids with their sheet music and it was a sad disappointment. We gave one star for the concept and one star for the cats.
Ive played piano for years and thought this might help others struggling with rhythm. But it doesnt record all the keys we hit and keeps making us try again when we absolutely know we did it right the first time! Not helpful.
Best game ever we love this game so much pls make more rhythm cat levels.
The notes are not sensitive enough and most of the time when we tap them nothing happens.
Cant get past level 4 because it counts down in double time yet song is half time. IOW, its buggy.
We teach private piano and this app is great for enforcing rhythms. Our students love this app.
We got this app for our kids to practice rhythm. We really love the variety of music that sets the background for the exercises. So much nicer than clapping rhythms to a metronome. The one thing we wish the app included was a review of the exercise for the player to see which rhythms were missed. The standard is stringent: it is a stickler for holding notes for their full values and attack precisely on time. However, its hard to know why reasonable attempts are rejected. Is it that inadequate pressure was given for a particular beat, or is the player just not hitting the sweet spot on the answer pad? Or does the developer want people to practice each rhythm multiple times for mastery? Regardless of why, practice never hurt anyone, though some students might get discouraged.
This app does a wonderful job with song selection and varied rhythms. We appreciate the use of well-known tunes. We also like that the rhythms appear visually in meter, with measures. The only reason we are not giving it 5 stars is that we discovered an issue with our colorblind students, who cannot distinguish which notes go with which button. We wonder if there is an equally distinct choice of colors that would be accessible to most forms of colorblindness. We also would suggest, if possible, the option of slowing down a piece…or maybe the opportunity to practice it. Very happy with Rhythm Cat, and am using it in our teaching.
What a great idea! For the really rhythmically challenged, can there be a helper option? Maybe a clap sound to note the beat, that the learner could tap along with. We think this will help some children (and adults) understand the concepts of rhythm better, instead of just using colored notes to indicate success.
Really great learning tool and fun to boot. We really wish there was more content though: like full songs and more complex songs too.
Our kids love it but not the new background. They think it looks dull. Great content though.
1-3, tempo of count off and tempo of song do not match.
Our students have LOVED this game over the past couple years, but now they complain about the sluggishness between screens and we do not like the new scrolling feature where the student must move their eyes quickly back up a line, whereas before the entire rhythm could fit on one page. Colors are duller and not as many fun cats on the screens! :(.
This game is totally outdated we hate it it is the stupidest game we got.
We love this series of apps. Our kids and we just finished this app. Its fun to try to count it out loud while playing. An update could have a recording of someone counting off each level maybe. Then again, maybe that would make it too easy.
It is possible to hit unnecessary notes/beats as long as the main beats are still played in time for each notated rhythm.
We teach private music lessons and was on the hunt for fun music reading games to which we could refer our students – both young and old. This is perfect. Before we could in good conscience refer this game to our students, we had to play it all the way through. Our only criticism is that there is very little instruction once you make it past the first set of levels. We, as a teacher, would love to see more instruction with the syncopated rhythms – possibly an audio/visual example. Still, we will now be able to refer our students to this app as a fun way to practice rhythm. We also tried the bass cats game… That one is even better we think.
This game is a lot of fun until you hit a level where it is impossible to pass, not because the rhythm isnt executed properly but because the program doesnt quantize the answer properly. It would be helpful if there was an option to change the tempo of the music to help a student achieve a challenging level.
Anything that can get a bunch of eighth-graders trying over and over to get the rhythm perfect is all right in our book.
This is a cool app, but: 1)the accuracy is a little off – some mistakes can get by and Still earn 3 stars 2) can the name & composer of the background music be listed at each level? (we like the songs, and we are curious.).
We downloaded and tested several apps for learning/improving rhythm. Most had great graphics but in many cases terrible instructions. This one stands out. We are no professional musician,just someone looking to take his rhythm up several levels without having access to instruments or a metronome. This app,Combining basic "sheet music" that displays quarter/half/whole notes, etc, you tap to a beat played accordingly. If you don't play it(tap)in time correctly, it " flunks" you at the end of the piece. Well done to the developer.
Love this app! Good for practicing rhythm but not always accurate enough.
This is excellent motivation to practice rhythms. It doesn't catch all of our mistakes but it catches most of them; it needs to be used with a desire to improve, not cheat.
We use this app in piano lessons, and it has some flaws. As Pianoteacher3 mentioned, the app is not always accurate at determining whether or not rhythms have been played correctly. Specifically, in the earlier levels, some students have gotten frustrated and started just pushing the green button as quickly as possible and the game counts it as correct! Students lose interest in actually playing the game once they discover this trick; they just want to button mash. This problem is reduced once rests are introduced.
We've had this game for a while now and like to use it as an incentive at the end of piano lessons. However, yesterday we noticed one of our students who struggles with rhythm was not with the beat at all and it was still turning the notes green. Could be such a great tool, but doesn't seem like it's accurate enough.
We always fail the rest levels because when we lift our finger off it doesn't register so we always fail.
We use this app to teach drum lessons. We wish that you could change the tempo because some songs are too fast for beginners. We would also like the app to tell the name of a note when a new note is introduced. Other than that…awesome! Jake Burton Nashville, TN.
We struggle with rhythms, and this app is perfect for practicing! Really hope there will be new levels soon.
Beautifully designed, well written musical numbers, challenging rhythms in a logical succession. Great game.
We are in currently in college and tutor percussion. This is a fantastic app for rhythms. We think a practice mode for the faster rhythms would be nice but over all a fantastic app for learning and teaching rhythms.
As addictive as Angry Birds, but you're learning as you play! Eagerly waiting for more levels/songs.
Good for practicing. A very nice interface, with good feedback about what you're getting right or wrong. Fun to play and not boring at all. The only thing we don't like about it is that the progression of difficulty is too steep for us – we wish there were more exercises on one skill before introducing new things.
Touch button too sensitive. Even the slightest millisecond off, and you fail the whole rhythm. As a former student of Tap Master, this pales in comparison. We'll find something else for our students.
This really has helped our reading. We're a drummer and never had much use for reading until we started trying to learn out of books.
Using this as a music teacher in our middle school classrooms. The kids love playing along visually and performing rhythms while counting out loud. Most exercises include excerpts from popular melodies. Suggestion to developers to expand and improve This program is missing triplet rhythms, dotted eighths, repeat signs, tempo markings, and changing meter such as 6/8, 2/2, and 5/4. Nevertheless, awesome find.
We are a percussionist and this game helped us out with complexed beats. This game is awesome now we jam out on our drums this year.
O our goodness! This game is amazing! We are taking piano right now and our piano teacher hooked us up on this game! We just completed all the levels and we are planning on doing it again! Thank you for making up this game! It rocks! Be sure to make another app and we will by it for sure! Rhythm cat has changed our piano life.
Great game, but glitchy at times. Would give more stars, but we thought it was expensive for the little amount you get to play.
We love the idea of this game. Unfortunately, we can play when there is supposed to be a rest and there is a significant delay when evaluating if we played the beat correct. We are using the newest iPad mini.
That game was so fun!! We struggled a lot with stage 3 levels 13-14, and we have a Bachelor of Music. We'd like to suggest a "Practice Mode" for some of those really fast rhythms. Thanks for the great game! Looking forward to a Stage 5 with 16th notes to be added.
We absolutely love this app. It is a fun and efficient way to get kids to practice reading rhythm.
We really loved the app and purchased it for our students; however, on level 3 game 11 it always registers as failed level so you become stuck :( The rhythm reads as being correct, but then fails you anyway. We have a master's degree in music so we know we are doing it correctly. What a bummer.
This app is a good concept, but too hard for even an adult to work. Once you get behind on a note, there is no way to know where the song is and you can't catch up. It's a lot like the dance video games, but there are prompts on those.
This is an amazing app. We are a music educator and our students love this! They feel like they're playing a game, but it really helps us assess they're strengths and weakness and it sure beats the old-fashioned flash cards. We love that it changes meter, uses ties and syncopations, and gets progressively harder. We can't say enough about this app.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 5.4
- Size: 86.26 MB
- iOS: 12.1 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [James Uhart]()
Last updated: 24th June 2022 | Genre: Education, Music | Developer: James Uhart