I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust

3. Rust is a boring language.

4. Recurse!

"toss them money" ? i'm confused. Also, if you view-source you can see some boilerplate that strongly suggests it's flutter

+1, just as effective as in other phone tuner without all the obnoxious ads.

I’m self taught, and I tend to think of flats because I tend to downtune. I think others choose the flat or sharp based on their desired key. That doesn’t help me describing a tuning if I’m playing out of the tuning’s assumed key! I have adopted one set of tunings which requires bringing the second string higher than the first, which I usually dedicate to a guitar with the strings swapped so I don’t break them all the time. (Adapted from very closely watching performances by Kelli Rudick if you’re curious.) I always describe the 2nd string tuning with sharps unless I have a good reason not to.

None of this is meant as advice, it’s just how I reason about using the instrument myself in ways it wasn’t necessarily intended.

I assume it's because tuning a string up can break it, while tuning it down is harmless.

I would guess that it's to do with the fact that musicians generally use the key with fewer sharps/flats. E.g., Bb major (2 flats) instead of A# major (5 sharps). This also follows what's on the circle of fifths, where major keys clockwise from C use sharps, and vice versa.

In the case of drop Db, I would also guess that people just think of it as "slightly lower than drop D", hence just adding a flat symbol.

I really don't know why that's the convention. I always assumed it was due to the minor scale/modes having so many flats. The only mode with a sharp is Lydian - and that's a single sharp! Even the major mode Mixolydian has a flat! Natural minor has 3 flats.

Each string has it's fundamental frequency and harmonics. Some of them coincide or are very close in frequency, but some are unique to one string so can be picked out and their frequency measured with a FFT of sufficient resolution and used to indicate the tuning of the string it must be a harmonic of.

(Polytune is more robust than just doing this and does work really well, but if the guitar is really out of tune the method falls apart and you have to use its one-string-at-a-time mode)

Fourier Transform, identify the fundamentals by loudness and/or presence of harmonics?

My Snark died and I was about to order another one when I saw the TC Electronic PolyTune. I splurged and bought it. I love it!

Because you can see the tuning of all the strings at once. You strum and they all show up. Then you can see which ones are more out of tune than others and tune them together. Prevents problems where changing the tuning (tension) of one string throws another string out of tune. I call it "global tuning." It gives you precise tuning extremely fast.

Yes, but to be fair it's awfully hard to find a free app that does the same without bloat due to any kind of ads. I'm going to buy this app just because of frustration due to that.

I will pay anywhere from $1 to $5 to eliminate ads, so this is a good value, considering the free apps almost all have ads, if I recall. Or are provided by one of the larger guitar companies and promote their subscription/learning platforms?

I find the idea that $1 is a "hard sell" laughable, but unfortunately for software devs that is the world we find ourselves in when trying to monetize an idea.

The intersection of "free", "no ads", and "works right" is often pretty bad. This at least has the web interface where you can see roughly what you would be getting.

I agree. Although this might be more about covering development costs than making OP money.

An important distinction so many entrepreneurs fail to make. Don't enter a saturated market without anything new on the table if you intend to make money.

The problem with this particular market is that musicians can mostly tune by ear. Most will have a dedicated tuner next to their instrument and worst of all these apps don't perform as well for a variety of reasons not least of all that the response of the device might be off.

Or if you’re paying, just spend the extra few books (it’s $10) and get Petersen Strobosoft which is the absolute gold standard.

Ok.

I was thinking the same thing- I've seen many mobile performant, web based tuners before, it's a very common personal project. If the intention was to make a web based tuner from the start, Flutter and Rust was a big step down from just using HTML and JS.

I know the trend on HN is to upvote any project with Rust in the title, and to hate on native JS, but projects like this that have to use a bunch of tooling to eventually compile down to JS would have almost always been better just using JS in the first place IMO.

That is true (that Flutter builds natively on all platforms it supports, and controls every pixel on the screen, unlike React Native and similar).

But I suspect these people were trying the web version of this (pretty neat, IMO) app.

Flutter does build for the web but then it does (of course) use web technologies to deliver the UI. To get the native experience on iOS, you'd have to download the iOS version from the App Store or something like that.

Computations can be reduced if you only care about frequencies near 6 particular ones (and maybe some harmonics).

> - native desktop/iOS (not currently released): https://crates.io/crates/clap

I hope you didn't use a command line parser to stream audio...

>Flutter for the UI. Rust for the listening, and pitch detecting backend. Connected the former with the latter using flutter_rust_bridge.

It's good to see that there is a active project to help with making Android apps using rust.

Why not just dart?

Awesome, thanks!

Thanks. Is dart performance that bad? I thought it compiled to machine code if needed.

With the web support I was hoping the since dart can be transpiled to JS Flutter might do something similar. I'll have to look into this, I'm learning Dart due to its ability to run on most platforms.

Do you mean this https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge ?

Yah, I keep meaning to get one of those, just haven't remembered to do it. And I'm super bad at guitar, so probably not playing anywhere outside of my basement for a while :P

I redeemed 4PLTCBMWVANG2DSDK5L6J0U.

Thank you!

Does not work on my Galaxy Note 9 unfortunately(I granted the recording permission, but it can't pick up any sound). However, it works fine on desktop Firefox. I think a try before you buy option would be useful.

Oh man, somehow I missed this on desktop. Thanks a lot!

So if you don't have a scroll wheel the interface is broken.

There was one strobe-like tuner for Android years ago that seemed to be something other than a visual representation of a standard digital tuner.

My understanding of the way it worked is that it took the waveform over some set N/frequency time, converted it to a 1D horizontal line of black→white pixels, and then stacked subsequent lines to create a 2D image, with new lines being added at the top and moving down. In tune (or a multiple of the root frequency for the image), you'd see a series of vertical black and white bars; out of tune, these bars would slant to the left or right, and move over time.

This method was actually somewhat like a strobe tuner in mechanism, replacing the persistence-of-vision appearance of the bars moving with a spatial representation of the audio waveform moving in comparison to the reference frequency. Presumably, this could also have been done without the stacked 2D representation, but that doesn't seem to be what apps like iStroboSoft do, as the bars are far too clean and even. While the app didn't do it, harmonic partials could have been added by having multiple simultaneous 2D images, each with a different reference frequency.

Unfortunately, the app and its developer disappeared years ago, and while I might still have the apk somewhere. I haven't seen anything like it since.

No. Although there is a 1.0 version APK floating around and that's what I use. It's pretty great.