About
A studio tool, built independently.
MakesPerfect organizes the week between lessons: the assignment, the practice log, and the piece you are supposed to be working on. This page covers who makes it, why it costs nothing, and what it refuses to do.
Who builds it
MakesPerfect is an independent project, written by PJ Doland. There is no company behind the name and no investors. It gets built carefully rather than quickly, and what is missing is missing because it has not been built yet, not because it is being held back for a plan you have to buy.
That is worth knowing before you move a studio onto it. It means the roadmap is short and the answers are direct. It also means there is no support department: mail goes to the address at the bottom of this page and comes back as a real answer rather than a ticket number.
Why it is free
MakesPerfect is free because there is no billing system in it. Not a free tier sitting under a paid one, not a trial with a meter running in the corner. There is no code anywhere in the project that takes money, and no plan you are being walked toward.
That describes today rather than every year to come. If charging ever becomes necessary, the change gets announced before it applies to anyone, and it does not arrive as a lock on work you have already done. Until then, what you can see is the whole product.
How this keeps running
It is worth being plain about the shape of the thing, because you are deciding whether to put your own work into it. MakesPerfect is an independent project. There is no company behind it, no investor, and no revenue, which is the same fact that makes it free and the same fact that means it comes with no service guarantee. It is run carefully, and it is run by a small effort rather than a large one.
The honest thing to weigh is what you could get back out. Some of it is already yours to keep: an interactive score is a file that opens in the same player hosted anywhere, and every PDF you upload you can download again. The rest, your practice history, your assignments, the notes on them, does not have an export button yet, the same way there is not a self-service delete button yet. Those are gaps, not features, and the fair thing is to name them here rather than let you find them later.
None of that is a promise about the future, because a promise a single small project cannot underwrite would not be worth reading. It is a description of where things stand. Put in as much as that description makes sense to put in, and no more.
Nothing is shared until the other person says yes
A teacher can invite a student. The invitation, on its own, shows the teacher nothing at all. It stays an invitation until the student accepts, and only then does the teacher see that student's practice logs, their progress through an assignment, or the music shared teacher-only. Ensembles follow the same rule: being added to a group is an invitation, not a membership.
Either side can end a relationship at any time, without asking the other, and ending it cuts off the access immediately. That is deliberate. Practice visibility is worth something only because it was granted, and a permission you cannot withdraw is not consent. It is the reason this site never describes a teacher watching a student practice as monitoring.
The whole of it is in what a teacher actually sees and in the privacy policy, which says the same thing in more detail and with fewer adjectives.
The player is open source, and the music was a gift
Interactive scores play, loop, and slow down without dropping pitch. The thing that does that is OpenVoicing, a separate open-source project at github.com/pjdoland/openvoicing (opens in a new tab). Scores are authored there, exported as an .ovb bundle, and uploaded here. None of that path is locked to this site: the format and the application that produces it are both public.
The demo library is 54 public-domain works engraved by the Mutopia Project, which typesets music with LilyPond from out-of-copyright sources and gives the results away. The compositions are long out of copyright and the editions carry no restriction on copying. They are here so that there is real, readable music to try the thing on before you upload anything of your own, rather than a page of placeholder rows.
Getting in touch
Mail support@makesperfect.org. A bug, a feature your studio needs, a piece that will not import, or a request to delete your account and everything attached to it: one address for all of it.
The privacy policy lists exactly what is stored and who can see it. The terms are short, and the summary at the top of them is accurate.
Start with one piece.
Make an account, put a single piece of music in it, and see whether the week between lessons looks any different.