Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

I am the creator of Trane (https://github.com/trane-project/trane/) which can replace Anki and similar systems for domains that have a well-defined hierarchy between subskills (turns out that's most of them, including learning vocabulary).

There are several unresolved issues with Anki, SuperMemo, at al.

1. Emphasis on memorization. I wanted something that could be applied to domains (music) whose scoring is not based on memorization, but mastery.

2. Lack of any hierarchical information limits how well it works to learn much larger skills. It's trivial to replicate the functionality of Anki with Trane: just have one lesson where you put all your exercises. Anki cannot replicate what Trane does, which is to use the dependencies of the many sub-skills to track and limit progress until mastery is achieved.

3. Emphasis on creating your own exercises. You are expected to come up with your own decks, which takes a lot of time. For complicated skills, you need to be a domain expert to really know how to do this.

Trane is pretty much done, and I have used it to teach myself music. It does not have a UI at the moment, so I am pretty sure I am the only user. Not that I mind, because I rather not work for free.

Currently working on a literacy tutor that will be built on top of it. When it's complete, it will be able to guide all students from learning their A-B-Cs to reading and writing at college level, backed by the most up-to-date research on reading and writing acquisition. Hopefully I will be able to release an MVP in the middle of the year.

> For complicated skills, you need to be a domain expert to really know how to do this. (...) I have used it to teach myself music.

It sounds like you must have had some interesting difficulties with that, not having been a domain expert in music. What were they and how did you overcome them?

I have been mostly working on a set of courses based around backing tracks I got from a course called “improvise for real”. So I only had to make the structure of those backing tracks explicit, which only required knowing the circle of fifths.