I don't know how "on" the beat you have to be. It seems a lot of slow songs have a good bit of wiggle room. Fast songs are a lot tighter on needing to be "right on" the beat. That said, I don't know that the moving bar is that useful for knowing when you show actually hit the note. It's more of a way to know which note you should be playing - the one closest to the bar. I use the Metronome to hear the beat and play with that.
One of the tricks is to use the "DEMO" hands at the top of the app (there is a left and a right hand) that will tell PGS to play the melody too. If you just listen to get a sense of the rhythm it won't grade that play through. Then, leaving the demo on, play along with it and try to play the notes with the program - again, ignoring the bar as arbiter of when to play and go by how it sounds. Once you get that sense of timing, you can turn off those two hands and just have your playback make the melody part.
Finally, perhaps there is a setting, like the "latency," that will rein in the timing between the computer and keyboard. The "other" program might be using different latency assumptions (that's the only one I actually know makes a difference). That will be something
support@playgroundsessions.com can work with you on.
== Just keep playing. Just keep playing. Just keep playing, playing, playing! ==
-- jbs --