oTuner

A Free Open Source Chromatic Tuner for Windows and Windows Mobile

Downloads

[Download] Tuner for Windows

[Download] Tuner for Windows Mobile

[Download] Chromatic Tuner source code

Note! Ensure Volume Bar is Green

The volume bar (on the far right hand side of the main screen) needs to be into the green before reliable tuning can be achieved (otherwise the tuning arrows become rather flickery); I've never got it high enough to go red, so I don't know if that is a problem or not! I discovered this by trying to tune my unamplified Hohner G3T headless electric guitar: it is do-able, but you need a microphone right under the strings!

If you are not getting anything at all on the volume bar, you may need to adjust your audio properties: The tuner uses your PC's "Preferred Device" for sound recording. There are various examples of how to configure the microphone as the recording device for Windows PCs floating around.

A good rule of thumb is if you can't record your instrument using Sound Recorder (Start/Programs/Accessories/Entertainment), then the tuner will not be able to hear it either.

You may also be interested in...

Copyright

oTuner is released under the GPLv3 Licence. It may only be copied, modified, redistributed etc. under the terms of that licence.

Features

Full instrument / musical chromatic tuner (full frequency range TBD: I know it works for my guitar:);

Indicates whether note is sharp, flat, or exactly right (with reference to a 440Hz "A");

Accurate to better than 2 cents.

Minimalist:)

Installation and How To Use

Just download the executable onto your device (Windows Mobile (PDA, PocketPC, XDA, etc.) users may want to use ActiveSync) and double-click it to run.

The coloured bar on the far right of the pitch indicator (blue through green and into the yellow in the example above) is an indication of the volume of the note being played. This needs to be at least into the green (as in the example above) for reliable tuning to be achieved (otherwise the tuner's indicator will tend to flicker around too much to make tuning feasible).

The note-name you are playing is displayed on the right hand side of the main screen (D# in the example above). If the filled in arrows appear on the left of the central bar (as in the example above), then the note is too flat (guitarists, tighten your strings!); if the arrows appear on the right, then the note is too sharp (slacken your guitar strings). You should aim to have the central rectangle (just under the "R" in "oTuner") "bracketed" by filled in arrows: this indicates that the note is at the correct pitch.

If you want to remove the executable: delete it!

Using oTuner as a Chromatic Guitar Tuner

Firstly, make sure that the string you are trying to tune is within the correct octave: if the guitar has been tuned before, it is almost certainly fine. If you've just restrung it, you will need some reference, e.g., an Online Guitar Tuner (your ear, if it is good enough:) Standard guitar tuning (low to high) is E2, A2, D3, G3, B3, E4.

With that done, you should be fine to just hit the string (electric guitars will likely need to be amplified - I can just about tune my Gibson 335 in a quiet room without amplification), and read the tuner output; you may find 12th-fret harmonics give a more stable reading (they did on my classical guitar).

Using oTuner to Tune Other Musical Instruments

As it is a proper chromatic tuner, oTuner should work just fine for any musical instrument (including weird guitar tunings, I have not yet tried it with my bass, but I'd imagine it is fine). Just be aware that there is not currently any indication of what octave the displayed note resides within.

Caveats

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE!

So: it is not entirely finished yet, but "seems to work". Windows users wanting something that is finished and definitely works might check out the awesome, open source Tartini project (more about this later); Windows Mobile users might try PhonTuner, a commercial program (free to try) which I am not in any way affiliated with, but which does run very well on my old iPAQ.

There is currently no indication of which octave the note lies within (e.g., "C4, C5" etc).

Compiling

The source can be built using the free Microsoft Visual C++200*e Compiler for Windows, or the free eVC++4.0 compiler for Windows Mobile (and eMbedded Tools 3.0 for older WinCE3). Unfortunately, MSVC++200*e does not produce executables that will run on Windows 9x or NT (I use my own copy of MSVC++6 for this, try eBay; a workspace is provided in the source ZIP).

Support

I can be contacted at 5thWheel@gmail.com, or through SourceForge; try not to trip gmail's spam filters:)

Thankyou!

Thank you for the real-time music analysis source code from Tartini, Philip McLeod: a cut-down version of the Tartini "hard sums" is the only reason this application does anything at all. I don't entirely understand how they work, so any mistakes are mine, not Philip's: please don't bother him about oTuner, but do feel free to bother me:) I began this project in order to get the tuning aspect of Tartini running on my PDA; I have had to hack it about a bit in order to move away from FFTW, as I had problems getting it to work on my PDA.

Thank you for Kiss FFT: simple and easy to understand FFT source code in C. Kiss FFT is a tiny, efficient, mixed-radix FFT library that can use either fixed (very useful for ARM developers!) or floating point data types, and has specific routines for real-only input FFTs (and inverses). I used Kiss FFT as an alternative to FFTW (which is what Tartini uses) because I found FFTW hard to understand and gave up any hope of getting it to run on my PDA. Don't get me wrong, I am sure FFTW is very *fast*, but I just don't need that at the cost of its complexity.

Thank me!

If you like oTuner, please consider Supporting This Project.