Welcome to Arco — the app that captures your lessons and turns them into a searchable, living musical memory.
A lot of what happens in lessons disappears. The metaphor that finally makes sense, the specific fingering advice, the way your teacher explained something. You might scribble notes, but it's never the same. Arco captures it.
Arco records your music lessons, transcribes them, and creates searchable summaries. Every piece of advice, every exercise, every breakthrough moment — captured and organized so nothing gets lost. Think of it as an all-knowing intelligent agent that has studied all the great pedagogues, sat in on all of your lessons, remembers everything, and can make connections across different methods and across time.
This guide walks you through everything Arco can do.
Getting Started
Arco is a mobile app for iPhone and iPad (iOS 15.2+ required). There is also a fully featured web app that works in the browser on your computer or laptop — everything syncs seamlessly across all your devices.
Write to hello@arco.app for a beta trial link.
There's no setup required — you can start recording your first lesson right away, or explore Arco chat without any recordings at all. Everyone starts with a free plan that includes 2 credits to get you going (see Credits & Plans for details).
To learn more about Arco, visit the homepage at arco.app.
Recordings vs Chat
Arco revolves around two main areas: Recordings and Chat.
Recordings is where your lesson library lives. This is where you record new lessons, import old audio or transcripts, review summaries and transcripts, play back audio, organize lessons with tags, and open dashboards.
Chat is where you ask questions and think with your library. Ask naturally, and Arco will decide whether to draw on Arco Knowledge for broader pedagogy, technique, interpretation, and practice ideas, or ground the answer in your own recordings and transcripts when lesson history matters. You do not need to pick a separate mode before asking.
On mobile, tap the icon at the top of the screen to move between Recordings and Chat. On the web app, use the sidebar.
Credits & Plans
Everyone starts with a free plan that includes 2 credits.
- Each processed lesson recording costs 1 credit.
- Each Deep Dive chat costs 1 credit.
- Normal chat is unlimited and doesn't cost any credits, whether Arco answers from Arco Knowledge or grounds the response in your lessons.
When you're ready for more, you can upgrade to a paid plan directly in the app. There are also one-time credit top-ups available, which never expire. During the beta, all upgrades and top-ups are completely free.
The payment system is in test mode. When upgrading or purchasing top-ups, use the test card number 4242 4242 4242 4242 with any made-up expiration date, CVC, and name. Do not enter your real credit card — it will not work. No real charges are ever made during the beta.
Recording a Lesson
Recording is designed to stay out of your way. Here's the full process:
- Open Arco and tap the Record button.
- Set your phone aside. You don't need to interact with it during the lesson.
- When the lesson is over, pick up your phone and tap Stop.
That's it. Arco handles everything else.
You don't need to keep Arco open while recording. Lock the screen, switch apps, put the phone in your pocket — recording continues in the background without issue. On iPad, this means you can record your lesson while reading from forScore or any other app at the same time.
Arco works in any language automatically — just speak naturally. There's nothing to configure.
On supported iPhones, active recording also appears in the Dynamic Island and on the Lock Screen, so you can confirm at a glance that recording is still running.
After you stop recording, the app will begin processing in the background. This typically takes a few minutes depending on the length of the lesson. By the time you've packed up your instrument, the transcription and summary will usually be ready.
Put your phone on Do Not Disturb before recording to avoid interruptions.
Importing Past Lessons
Already have lesson recordings or transcripts from before you started using Arco? You can bring them in from both the mobile app and the web app.
If you've been teaching or studying on Zoom and have months (or years) of old lesson files, you're likely sitting on a gold mine. Arco accepts audio files (.m4a, .mp3, .wav) and text transcripts (paste, manual entry, or .txt upload). Once imported, Arco processes them the same way it handles live recordings, generating summaries and making the content searchable in chat.
On mobile, use the Import button from your recordings screen. On the web app, open Library and use the same import flow there. Both apps support importing audio and transcripts, so you can use whichever device is most convenient.
When importing, you can set the lesson date using the date picker so the lesson appears in the correct chronological position in your library. This keeps your timeline accurate even when adding older material.
Importing past lessons builds out your library, which makes lesson-grounded chat and Dashboards more useful — the more lessons Arco knows about, the better it can find patterns and give context-aware answers.
Your Library
The Library is your home screen — a chronological list of all your recorded lessons.
Each entry shows the lesson date, a brief summary preview, and any tags you've applied. From here you can:
- Tap any lesson to open its full summary and transcript.
- Star lessons to mark important ones for quick reference later.
- Edit lesson names, summaries, or the student name.
- Search across all your lessons by keyword.
- Filter by tag — tap any tag to see all matching lessons.
- Swipe left on any recording for quick actions — copy the share link or share a PDF in one gesture.
- Bulk actions — tap Edit to select multiple recordings, then share or delete them all at once.
- View Dashboards for any tag — see all its lessons in one place.
Everything in your library syncs automatically across all your devices.
Starred lessons are easy to find when you want to revisit a breakthrough moment or review something before your next session.
Tags
Tags are your way of organizing lessons however you want. The most common approach is to tag lessons with student names — Arco often detects these automatically. But you can tag with anything that helps you stay organized: a topic like “Legato”, a composer like “Mozart”, a specific piece, or even an event like “Summer Festival”.
Tags power two things: filtering in your library (tap any tag to see only matching lessons) and Dashboards, which give you a condensed, at-a-glance summary of every lesson under a given tag.
You can add, edit, or remove tags on any lesson.
Sharing
Arco makes it easy to share lessons in several ways:
Lesson PDFs
Every processed lesson can be shared as a beautifully formatted PDF containing the summary and key details. Share directly to your contacts, or save it for your records. Great for teachers sending lesson notes to students or parents after a session. When exporting a summary, you can choose the original summary or a generated remix.
Quick Share
From the library, swipe left on any recording to instantly copy its share link or share a PDF — no need to open the lesson first. For multiple recordings, tap Edit to enter selection mode, choose the lessons you want, and use bulk share or bulk delete.
Share Code
Each account has a unique share code (found in Settings). Share your code with someone and they can add you as a contact. When you share a lesson, it appears directly in their Arco app — complete with the summary, tags, and audio file. No links or downloads needed. This is the easiest way to set up a regular sharing channel between teacher and student, or between lesson partners.
Chat PDF Export
On the web app, you can export any chat conversation as a PDF. Arco's responses can be incredibly rich and detailed — sometimes they deserve to be a document you can save, print, or share.
Lesson Summaries & Transcripts
When you tap into a lesson, you'll see two main sections:
Summary
Arco generates a structured summary of what happened in the lesson, powered by a custom AI that was specifically trained to understand music pedagogy. This includes the key topics covered, specific advice given, exercises assigned, and any notable moments. It's designed to truly get at the heart of the advice — preserving detail yet staying brief. Think of it as a polished version of the notes you'd ideally take, but never quite have time to.
The summary captures the specific things your teacher said: the exact metaphors, the particular fingering suggestions, the nuanced explanations. These are the details that tend to slip away after a lesson, and Arco makes sure they don't.
Summary Remixes
You can generate optional remixes of the lesson summary: Short, Youth, and Parent. These are derived from the original summary and designed for different readers.
Transcript
The full raw transcript of the lesson is also available. It's useful when you want to find the exact words your teacher used or revisit a specific explanation in detail.
Editing
Summaries are editable. If Arco gets something wrong — a piece name, a fingering, a technical term — just tap the Edit button and correct it.
Take 30 seconds after each lesson to skim the summary and fix anything that looks off. It keeps your library accurate and useful over time, and also mentally “locks in” the wisdom of the lesson.
Audio Player
Every recorded lesson has a built-in audio player with tools designed for reviewing and practicing.
Waveform & Navigation
The player displays a visual waveform of the full recording. Tap anywhere on the waveform to jump to that point — useful for quickly navigating to a specific part of the lesson.
Waveform Zoom
You can zoom in on the waveform to focus on smaller passages. This makes it easier to inspect a brief demonstration, locate a specific correction, or work repeatedly on a short section without scrubbing through the entire lesson.
Speed Control
Adjust playback speed from 0.5x to 2.5x. Slow things down to catch a tricky passage, or speed through a long lesson to find the section you're looking for.
A-B Loop
Set two points in the recording and Arco will loop between them continuously. This is ideal for practicing along with a teacher demonstration, transcribing specific advice, or drilling a passage your teacher played for you.
Bookmarks
Mark important moments in the recording and jump back to them anytime via the bookmarks sidebar. Useful for flagging key demonstrations, exercises, or turning points in the lesson.
Your audio files, summaries, transcripts, and bookmarks all sync across your devices automatically.
Use A-B loop during practice to play along with your teacher's demonstrations. Set the loop, pick up your instrument, and repeat until it feels natural.
Chat with Arco
Each chat with Arco can move naturally between broad musical questions and your own lessons. Just ask naturally. Sometimes Arco answers from its broader musical knowledge, and sometimes it brings in your lesson history when that is what matters most.
You can start using chat immediately, even before recording a lesson. As your library grows, Arco becomes more personal because it can bring in things your teacher said, patterns across students, and ideas that have come up over time.
If Arco brings in your lessons, it only uses recordings, transcripts, and summaries from your own account.
What Arco Already Knows
Arco has a broad understanding of technique, interpretation, repertoire, practice methods, and the teaching traditions behind them. That means you can ask big musical questions, troubleshoot a technical problem, or ask for practice ideas even when the question is not tied to a specific lesson.
The sample prompts below are worth trying verbatim. They give a good feel for the kinds of broader musical questions Arco can help with right away.
Try questions like:
- Technique questions — “My vibrato feels tight and mechanical. What should I adjust first?”
- Practice strategies — “How do I practice slow passages without them feeling boring?”
- Pedagogical approaches — “How does Galamian's approach to shifting differ from Flesch?”
- Practice plans — “Create a 45-minute practice plan for my audition repertoire.”
- Understanding concepts — “What's the relationship between arm weight and bow speed?”
- Diagnosing issues — “I have tension in my left shoulder. What might be causing it?”
- Exploring repertoire — “How should I approach a piece I've never heard before?”
- Exercises — “What exercises help with clean string crossings?”
These kinds of questions work from day one. Later, if you follow up with something like “What has my teacher said about this?”, Arco can bring your own lesson history into the same chat.
What Arco Can Find in Your Lessons
When your question is about something from your own teaching or practice history, Arco can look through your recorded lessons, transcripts, and summaries and answer from what was actually said.
To do that, Arco needs at least one processed recording or imported lesson in your library.
Students might ask:
- Recalling specific advice — “What has my teacher said about improving my vibrato?”
- Reviewing assignments — “What pieces have we worked on in the last month?”
- Finding details — “What fingerings did my teacher recommend for the Brahms?”
- Practice strategies — “What practice strategies has my teacher suggested for difficult passages?”
- Identifying patterns — “What recurring issues has my teacher mentioned?”
- Planning practice — “Create a practice plan based on my recent lessons.”
Teachers might ask:
- Tracking a student over time — “What have I worked on with Sarah in the last three months?”
- Spotting patterns across students — “Which students have I discussed bow distribution with recently?”
- Preparing for a lesson — “Summarize where Alex left off last week and suggest what to cover next.”
- Building content from your teaching — “Consider everything in my lessons about intonation and organize it into a 1-hour workshop outline.”
- Reflecting on your approach — “How have I explained shifting across all my lessons? What analogies come up most?”
These answers can quote or paraphrase your own lesson history and point you back to the relevant passages, so it feels like searching your musical life without leaving the conversation.
A Natural Conversation
One of the best parts of chat is that you can stay in the same thread while the focus shifts. For example:
“Give me ideas to improve the clarity of my dynamics and phrasing.”
Arco responds with ideas drawn from its broader musical and pedagogical knowledge: historical approaches, listening ideas, practice concepts, and concrete strategies.
Then ask “What has my teacher told me about this topic?” or, as a teacher, “Which of my students have the most trouble with this?”
Arco responds accordingly, describing the relevant lessons, the teacher's advice, recurring student patterns, and exact citations back to the source material.
Next ask “What have famous pedagogues said about the advice my teacher gave me?”
Arco can then compare your teacher's advice with the views of major pedagogues, showing where they align, where they differ, and how the ideas might apply in practice.
Deep Dive
For more complex or in-depth questions, Arco offers Deep Dive chats. Deep Dive does not change what Arco can reference; it gives Arco more room to reason through difficult questions, whether the answer draws on Arco Knowledge, your lessons, or both. Each Deep Dive chat costs 1 credit (see Credits & Plans). Normal chat is always unlimited.
Dashboards
Every tag gets its own Dashboard — a condensed, at-a-glance view of all the lessons under that tag. Each lesson is distilled into a brief summary: what was worked on, what was assigned, what's planned next. You can scan an entire teaching history in seconds without opening individual lessons. For student-name tags, you'll also see key follow-ups at a glance — what they were supposed to practice, prepare, or bring — so you never have to rely on memory.
Navigate between tags using the scrollable strip at the top of the Dashboards view.
Dashboards are most powerful for student-name tags, where you get a complete picture of a student's progress at a glance. But they work for any tag — “Mozart”, “Summer Festival”, or whatever you've used to organize your lessons.
It's the kind of preparation that used to take 10 minutes of flipping through notes — now it's one tap.
Lesson Plans
From any Dashboard, you can generate a lesson plan with a single tap. Arco reviews all the lessons in that dashboard — what was covered, what was assigned, what needs follow-up — and suggests a structured plan covering:
- This lesson — what to focus on right now, based on where things left off.
- Medium term — goals and priorities for the coming weeks.
- Long term — bigger-picture development and repertoire trajectory.
The plan opens as a chat, so you can refine it — ask Arco to adjust the focus, add specific repertoire, or shift priorities.
Lesson plans work best when the dashboard represents a single student, since the plan draws on all the lessons in the dashboard to build a sense of continuity and progression. This is the main reason to tag your lessons with student names.
Web App
Arco's web app is full-featured — the same core capabilities as the mobile app, designed for when you're at a computer.
In addition to your full library, chat, and dashboards, the web app offers:
- Contact management — add, edit, and delete contacts directly in Settings.
- Send to Contact — share a recording directly with a contact from the lesson view.
- Inline tag editing — add and manage tags on lessons, just like on mobile.
- Chat PDF export — save any chat conversation as a formatted PDF you can print or share (see Sharing).
- Dark mode — toggle between light and dark themes, or follow your system preference.
- Full audio player — waveform navigation, speed control, A-B loop, bookmarks, and waveform zoom — same core tools as the mobile app.
- Keyboard shortcuts — Space (play/pause), arrow keys (seek),
[/](loop points),\(clear loop),B(add bookmark). - Audio and transcript import — bring older lessons into your library directly from your computer.
Your library, audio files, chat, contacts, bookmarks, and settings all sync across devices. Work on your phone during a lesson and pick up right where you left off on your computer.
Tips for Students
Here's a simple workflow to get the most out of Arco:
Open Arco and skim yesterday's summary. Note one thing you want to focus on today.
Hit record, put your phone aside, and forget about it. Focus on playing.
Give the app a few minutes to process, then skim the summary. Edit anything that's off. Note the key takeaways.
Open chat and try prompts like:
- “Create a practice plan based on today's lesson.”
- “What should I focus on this week based on my last lesson?”
- “Design a warm-up routine that addresses my main issues.”
The summaries build on each other. After a few weeks of recording, you'll have a searchable archive of everything you've been taught — incredibly useful before auditions, recitals, or juries.
Tips for Teachers
Arco is equally useful on the teaching side. Record your lessons and use the app to:
- Track what you've covered with each student over time.
- Review your own teaching by skimming summaries of past lessons.
- Prepare for lessons by asking, “What have I said about [technique] across my lessons with [student]?”
- Use Dashboards for a quick overview — recent lessons, plans, and follow-ups — before a student walks in.
- Generate lesson plans with one tap, covering near-term, medium-term, and long-term goals.
- Share lesson PDFs with students or parents right after each session — or set up a share code for automatic delivery.
Tag each student's lessons and use Dashboards to pull up their full history at a glance.
Troubleshooting & FAQ
Processing is taking a long time.
Longer recordings take more time to transcribe and summarize. A 60-minute lesson may take several minutes. If it seems stuck, close and reopen the app — processing continues in the background.
If lesson processing says “failed”
Please let me know what you did step-by-step. You can retry via Retry or ⋮ (top right) → Reprocess with AI.
Chat is responding slowly.
Detailed questions or large lesson histories can take a moment to process. Give it a few seconds — the response will stream in.
Can I use Arco without recording anything?
Yes. Arco chat works without any recordings. You can ask technique questions, request practice plans, and explore pedagogy from day one. Once you add lessons, Arco can also ground answers in your own history automatically.
What devices does Arco support?
Arco is a mobile app for iPhone and iPad (iOS 15.2+). There is also a full-featured web app for use on any computer or laptop. Your library, audio files, chat, contacts, bookmarks, and settings all sync across devices.
Does Arco work in languages other than English?
Yes. Arco automatically detects and works in any language — recording, transcription, summaries, and chat all work seamlessly regardless of what language is spoken in your lessons.
Sending Feedback
Arco is currently in testing, and your feedback directly shapes how the app develops.
Private help stays private. If something is broken, confusing, billing-related, or you need a human quickly, use Support and start with support chat or the private bug form.
Public product direction now has a separate path. Use the feedback board to see promoted feature requests and known issues, use the roadmap to see what is under review or in progress, and use Learn for shorter articles and how-to videos.
When reporting an issue, it helps to include:
- What you were doing at the time
- What happened
- What you expected to happen
- A screenshot, if possible — if you take a screenshot in the app, you'll see a button to send it to me with any comments.
Bug reports are valuable, but so is feedback about things that feel confusing, slow, or unclear. If something doesn't feel right, that's worth sharing. Use support for private context, and use the public board when you want to see whether other people are pushing on the same product direction too.