The five play modes

Every mode plays the same generated song. What changes is what the game asks of you: whether misses matter, whether you are competing, and whether you touch the screen at all. Switch modes with the pills under the title on the main menu; the one-line description under them always tells you what you picked.

Timing, and what the game is judging

Notes fall down four lanes toward a hit line. Tap the lane the moment its note reaches the line. How close you were sets the grade: PERFECT inside 75ms, GREAT inside about 142ms, GOOD out to 170ms, and past that it counts as a miss. Landscape widens all three slightly, since the lane is shorter. Sharper timing builds your combo and earns more coins.

If your taps feel right but land late, the device is adding audio latency. Run Settings → Controls → Calibrate once and the game shifts the windows to match your hardware. See Controls for the full input list.

JAM

Tap the notes and ride the track. Misses never end the song, so it is the mode for playing a genre you have never heard before, for playing badly on purpose, and for anyone who just wants the music. It is the default, and it is where the DJ booth is easiest to experiment with mid-song.

MIX

The same notes, but the song is on the line: five misses in a row and the run ends. It is the mode that rewards knowing a genre well enough to remix it while you play, because the stem controls stay live the whole time.

BATTLE

You against a rival on the same song. Your hits drain their bar, your misses drain yours, and the sharper timing wins the floor. Nothing about the song changes, so a genre you know well is an advantage.

AUTO

The game plays the notes and you watch. It is a performance mode rather than an idle one: the DJ booth still works, so you can dice stems, shuffle, mute and lock while the song plays itself. Good for hearing what a genre does without splitting your attention, and good for showing someone what the game is.

RADIO

Endless songs, hands free. One track ends and the next is generated straight away, so it works as background music. Turn on AUTO SHUFFLE in Settings → GAME to have each song evolve while it plays, and on mobile the media controls in the notification shade drive it like any music app. If you use a screen reader, RADIO is the default mode.

Arcade modes are separate

The ARCADE button on the main menu takes the song somewhere else entirely: five small games that use the generated track as their level. They are not play modes, they are their own thing, and the demo includes STAR WARP.

Next: the DJ booth for remixing a song while it plays, or CREATE mode for building one from scratch.