PocketTorah Trope +4

I’m using this as a practical practice for when a recording from my Hazzan is unavailable. Our conservative synagogue is triennial and if portions were available for that, it would be appreciated. This is very good to read from and bookmarking even parts of a portion would be a great help in an update.

This has been helpful for brushing up on trope.

A woman chants the trope, which some users have complained about as an issue of Kol Isha; however, for it to legitimately count as Kol Isha you have to see the woman or at least know what she looks like, and many poskim argue that a recording or broadcast is not a “voice” but rather a transformed thing (dvar hadash)—the same reason one is not yotzeh from hearing the shofar or Megillah over the radio.

I was excited to find this app, but after using it for a while I find it more confusing than helpful. There are a number of trope phrases that are sung, but with no real cumulative build up of phrases in increasing complexity. Then, when you go to the PocketTorah app from the same company, it seems like the Torah is sung in a completely different way than the way it was taught in the PocketTrope app, with no explanation whatsoever as to why the two are so different. A real exercise in confusion and really bad pedagogy!