Fun toy: strobe tuner simulator

[danielhorn]

Hi all,

I recently did some research on strobe tuners and, after discovering that I couldn't afford to buy a proper physical one, decided to invent a software version.

It's here:
http://danjony.com/daniel/StrobeTuner.zip

Just unzip to a folder on your computer, plug in a microphone, and run StrobeTuner.exe. I wrote this for my own use, so it's not terribly pretty, and I've only tested it on my fairly beefy computer so I make no guarantees that it will work on yours. If it's too slow (watch the "Dropped Audio frames" value in the status bar at the bottom) you can possibly improve performance by tweaking some of the display options.

I used some fancy display tricks to simulate the optical illusion that makes physical strobe tuners do what they do. This is *not* just a strobe-like display of a standard frequency-dectection algorithm, this is an actual simulation of a moving image being illuminated by an audio-driven lamp. The "fancy display tricks" are required to overcome the fact that your monitor only refreshes about 60-75 times per second.

By default, the tuner starts in "auto-detect" mode, which tries to set the reference frequency at the note/octave nearest the one you're playing (equal-tempered by default, crucially also supports just temperment, just pick the root key from the dropdown). You can turn this off and set the note/octave yourself, or even enter the reference frequency directly.

Anyway, this works great for me... I've tested it to be incredibly accurate and precise (clearly shows <0.1Hz differences) using known-good tone-generators as input. The visual feedback makes a really neat practice aid for pipe and whistle playing. Thought some of you might be able to make use of it as well. Let me know what you think.

[the plod]

Hey now that's cool, I have looked at those Peterson strobe tuners on eBay but have never bought one - this is neat.

Jeff

[the plod]

I copied this topic over to the reed and pipemaking forum too.

Jeff