Pitchdle

Pitchdle splits every song into two jobs. First it plays you a thirty-second preview that has been pitch-shifted off its true key and asks you to name the title or the artist. Then it hands you the slider and asks you to drag the audio back to where it originally sat, by ear, with nothing marking the correct setting. The day serves three songs, laid out as tabs across the top: pop, hip-hop and rock. Only the second job scores.

1. Pick one of the day's three songs from the tabs at the top: pop, hip-hop or rock.
2. Hit the play disc to cue the track. What you hear is a thirty-second preview at the wrong pitch.
3. Type into Search song or artist and lock in a name. Five guesses are shown as dots beside the player, and SKIP THIS SONG passes.
4. Move to phase two and slide the audio until it sounds like the record you know, then lock it in.
5. Repeat for the other two songs. The help panel states the day's final score is the average of the three.

Almost every music daily stops at 'name that tune'. Pitchdle uses the naming round as a warm-up and then asks the harder question: where did this actually sit? Dragging a slider until a familiar record snaps back into its own key is a strange, addictive sensation, and because the scale is continuous rather than right-or-wrong, a near miss still reads as a number you can beat tomorrow. The three-genre spread also means a day that starts badly in the pop slot can be rescued in rock, since the final figure is an average rather than a streak.

No tiles, no colours. The only running indicator during phase one is the five-dot guess counter and the 5 GUESSES LEFT line under the play disc. The real feedback is structural and the help panel is blunt about it: each song scores nought to a hundred on pitch accuracy alone, and naming the song correctly does not add points, it widens the pitch tolerance you are judged against in phase two. Guessing well buys you a bigger target, not a better score.

The daily three

One pop, one hip-hop and one rock slot, selectable as tabs and each carrying its own two phases. The help panel frames the day as three songs with the final score averaged across them.

• Treat phase one as insurance rather than as the game. Points come only from the slider, so spending guesses to widen your tolerance is the whole reason to bother naming the track.
• Nothing labels the original pitch in phase two, so you are matching against your own memory of the record. Humming the chorus as you drag is more reliable than watching the slider.
• Skipping a song is offered outright. If a track means nothing to you, passing on it and going straight to the pitch work keeps the day's average alive.