Show HN: I built an HTML 5 Guitar Tuner
freetuner.co
freetuner.co
(Note: Not affiliated with them in any way, just become a huge fanboy lately!)
I'm surprised they can tune to within a few cents in a few seconds.
And how does the weight feel? I put Planet Waves Auto Trim locking tuners (also highly recommended, btw) on my project Strat, and it became noticeable top heavy.
I don't notice any difference whatsoever from the Hipshot locking tuners I put on there previously. However, this particular guitar is slightly insane, weight-wise; two heavy magnetic pickups with metal cases, piezo bridge and preamp, GK-3 MIDI pickup. It's chambered, but weighs more than an unchambered LP Custom, due to all the extra equipment. So the headstock doesn't exactly add much.
2. The weight is probably slightly less than what you have now.
6 grover tuners from my les paul = 272 grams on my scale
The tronical tuners, including battery pack = 268 grams on my scale.
http://i.imgur.com/GV5TktA.png
Edit: I should also mention that this is really well done, and I've been looking for something simple like this for a while. Thanks for sharing!
(Jokes aside, this has a great design and it's an interesting application of the microphone API. Hope to see more apps using this feature in the future, especially in conjunction with the cool voice-to-JSON APIs that have recently come out.)
I mostly use a linux native app called lingot. It does the job but has small annoying bugs (settings file is not parsed properly, my ALSA device CARD:foo,bar=baz fails because of the colon character, I'll write a patch one of these days).
This guitar tuner works, I tuned my guitar succesfully with it but it was a bit painful. I'm on Firefox 27.0 on Linux, using Alsa, no PulseAudio. I am using a Microsoft LifeChat headphone + microphone laid on the table before me that is good enough to tune my guitar with Lingot. I would have tried Chromium for comparison but it seems I have a version that is too old.
There was a very bad latency, around 1 second from playing a note to seeing feedback on the display. The information I got back was decent and good enough to get my guitar in tune. Overall the quality of this was somewhat comparable to a cheap guitar tuner from the 1990s with an internal microphone. But I think the culprit here is the platform (ie. browser + audio frameworks) rather than the quality of the app itself.
What platform(s) have you used with tuner and how did it work out? What browser, OS and audio system did you use?
If you want me to help out testing this app, please reply and tell me what to test and I will.
Thanks for the review and feedback. The performance delay may be due to the high volume right now because of the posting.
Also this is a very very simple algorithm that I will likely replace. As stated below, the cool thing (I think) about this is that its all javascript. All other online tuners require flash to use the microphone. This is still somewhat of a proof of concept/prototype and I hope to improve.
I tested this on a macbook pro with the built-in microphone and mostly Chrome. It's great to know that it works on a completely different platform.
http://www.leshylabs.com/apps/tuner/
I haven't looked too closely, but my technique is probably a bit different. I use FFT only to gain a hint of where to look. FFT itself, at least in the form that is built into the web audio api, is not accurate enough for a tuner. Instead, after FFT tells me where to look, I use auto-correlation to scan those frequencies. I'm not sure if this is the ideal technique, but it seems to work pretty well.
I may have released too early, because back when I wrote this web audio input only worked in limited versions of Chrome. It didn't even work in the main release without changing flags, and so my release went mostly unnoticed on the internet.
I haven't checked in a few months, but I've been waiting for mobile support to catch up. Firefox mobile beta started somewhat working a few months ago, and I don't know if that moved up into the main version. While Chrome works well on the desktop now, on mobile I don't think they have any working web audio input support, unless that changed recently.
It seems to have trouble with the A on both of my classical guitars. The needle skips directly from one tick below to one tick above while never lighting up (despite the string being tuned correctly.)
Interestingly the needle shows C, D and E correctly using the A string at the 3rd 5th and 7th frets.
For my project, I was charting the dominant frequency for fun.
The needle was very stuttery, as opposed to other tuners which have a much higher frequency update. Is it always like this, or am I seeing perhaps an interaction effect with this non-standard mike?
Nice work, though.
Personally that UI is better for me.
And nice touch with the countdown too.
... but is it really worth it in this case? No, because guitar tuner apps are cheap and plentiful, and electric guitar players use an inline tuner rather than a tuner with a microphone. And for tuners with microphones I get annoyed when the tuner doesn't respond so I prefer a tuner that doesn't try to be too smart and filter out too much.
This is really just a cool example of audio signal processing in javascript (or I suppose we call it "HTML5" nowadays)
Sometimes people go out of their way to find flaws with a service - this is one of those times.
Only question, why does it have a 5 minute timeout?
When I see alerts like that, my reaction is "this guy just doesn't know what he's doing…it's probably just shitty browser sniffing".
Plus, you can probably use Modernizr to detect this feature, and show the message based on that.
Also, am I right in saying that you did your own fft rather than use the built in analyser? I tried to do one with the built in analyser a while back and had mixed results.