Show HN: Strobie – Strobe tuner for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Strobie – Strobe tuner for Mac

strobie-app.com

15 pointsdsego13 comments

Doesn't seem to be working for me. I'm on OSX 10.10 public beta 3. Here is what I see when I hit the low E on my guitar: http://cl.ly/image/2E3d0w2D3I1u

The note changes to E, but am I supposed to see something in the black area?

Not sure if it's related, but when I open the application I get a bunch of these messages in Console.app

9/21/14 6:40:06.000 PM kernel[0]: Sandbox: appleeventsd(31) deny file-read-metadata /Library

And several of these

9/21/14 6:40:06.000 PM kernel[0]: Sandbox: appleeventsd(31) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ocspd

Thank you so much for reporting this. The black area is supposed to display a pattern. It is implemented with OpenGL and CVDisplayLink. Apparently, it doesn't work on some machines (the display is black), but I tried on several and could never replicate it. I do not know if the console messages are related. Could you try running the binary from terminal and see if it prints out an error message?

I don't see anything when running it from the command line :(

http://cl.ly/image/3u3X24292e12

Can I give you anything else to help you repro it?

Oh, that sucks :/ So far, my best guess is that it is a graphic/driver issue. Can you send me your specs, processor, graphic card, that kind of thing? Maybe I can find a similar machine somewhere to debug on. Btw, thank you for taking the time to run it from terminal, I really appreciate it.

Maybe retina-related? It's the 2.3GHz version here http://support.apple.com/kb/SP653

Not retina, I have one (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013) at work and it runs fine. Might be something processor or thread-related. I'll change cvdisplaylink to nstimer and send you a link to try out that version. Might also disable all the optimizations and we can try that as well.

Not sure if you are going to see this, but I couldn't find your contact details. I whipped up two different versions that might work, one is with different build options and the other uses nstimer instead of cvdisplaylink to animate the display.

http://strobie-app.com/downloads/1.0_beta/Strobie-Beta-nstim...

http://strobie-app.com/downloads/1.0_beta/Strobie-Beta-o2.zi...

Let me know if any of them work. Thank you!

This is really cool -- how does it work?

It seems to work really well for everything except the bottom E string on my guitar, I just seem to get a blur however close to tuned it is.

Hey, thanks for trying it out! Instead of estimating pitch (except for detection) it generates an internal reference and shows the difference between that and the input signal. There's also filtering to get the separate octave bands. Not sure why it wouldn't work for the low E string. Does it lock onto the correct note? If it doesn't you can manually set the desired pitch by clicking on the note display and selecting E. Also, there is a gain setting in preferences, might be that the signal is too weak for the display.

Nicely done. It's similar to iStroboSoft, but I like the UI here. I still prefer Tonal Energy Tuner, though what works best for you will depend on your instrument.

Thanks, when I started working on this 4-5 years ago, there was only StroboSoft. Now there are a lot of strobe tuner out there, especially for smartphones. I was always fascinated by the mechanical strobes I saw on youtube and wanted to try replicating the effect. When I started I didn't know about Nyquist, PCM, FIR, IIR, FFT, etc. Had to learn about everything first and I still have so much to learn. First version was written in Vala, with JackAudio. After getting a Mac I rewrote everything in C and Obj-C.

Downloaded the file and unzipped but OSX says it's damaged.

Which OS X? Unfortunately it supports only 10.9 or later.

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