Show HN: Remotely use my guitar tuner
realtuner.onlineLinking it here since it's easy to miss. It seems he is using the popularity of this to help a friend recovering from brain surgery, I think this makes this project even more awesome in my book.
Donated. I always thought Playboy manbaby was a solo act nerdcore rapper.
But this is cool.
Thanks! Donated as well. When I grow up I want to have friends that will do the same to me...
When you grow up you should want universal healthcare...
Americans don’t want that.
We want to live in hell where any serious illness will completely ruin you.
Do you guys know this? https://www.thomann.co.uk/stompenberg_devices.html
You can use real pedals over the internet
there's a german blog post about this: https://www.amazona.de/thomann-stompenberg-fx/
Thomann had (still have?) this thing called "stompenberg", where they put up some mechanical switching system so that you could play audio files through the actual pedals in the system, and turn on the knobs / parameters.
In the recent years some smaller businesses have started to offer outboard gear in this way. You upload some stem, and can process it through their hardware remotely, and get back the results.
This is cool except that the only ad for this I've come across so far was for analog summing. Remote or not, that concept (going out of one's way to theoretically have something more pleasing than digital summing) always smelled like a scam to me. Like ok, maybe a sample rate a hair above what Shannon/Nyquist demand can't do digital summing with all the right IM distortion of the missing supersonic content or whatever, but 192kHz ought to solve for that! So is it something else to be gained via analog summing?
Oh the options get way better than that. Check these guys out: https://accessanalog.com
They have 60+ rack units with little robot grabbers physically controlling the knobs.
Re analogue summing, yeah it does near nothing in reality. What you're missing though is that what people actually want with analogue summing isn't really technically better sound but technically worse sound. Analogue gear might have a little bit of harmonic distortion, a little bit of crosstalk between channels, certain transformer characteristics etc that theoretically make it sound more glued together or warm etc etc. But ultimately summing is summing and those differences vs. digital are very small (and won't always contribute positively either).
I'm not interested in analog summing myself, but I think you're missing the point. It's not about "better" summing. You want more euphonic summing. Analog audio processing often comes with artefacts that give the signal sent through it a more pleasing character, for whatever reason (phase shift, saturation, channel differences between left and right, transient modulation, slew rate, power sag, etc.).
I personally think analog summing is a waste of time, because the differences are too subtle to be worth the investment in setting it up. But that's just my opinion. Some people are really into it (Eric Valentine comes to mind).
Just wanted to point out that in the context of audio equipment (both professional and audiophile) "sounds better" often means "sounds worse but more engaging". Just like a polaroid picture often evokes more emotions than a photo taken with a modern digital camera and a great lens.
No way! My friend and I were half joking about building that as a sequel to realtuner. If nothing else, it'd be a great excuse to buy more gear.
Do you really need an excuse to buy more gear? meme-be-honest.jpg
This is awesome, and, at the same time, hilarious. The BOSS tuner is the laggiest thing ever, and we're adding network latency to it!
Maybe we all can pitch in for a Turbo Tuner. Or some vintage mechanical strobe tuner for hipster points!
Let's scale horizontally!
As the actress said to the bishop
On Firefox/Linux, after allowing mic access, I get a "Failed to access microphone" above the button, and in the javascript console:
[ws] Microphone error: DOMException: AudioContext.createMediaStreamSource: Connecting AudioNodes from AudioContexts with different sample-rate is currently not supported.
Sounds like normal Linux behavior to me
I love it.
But in all seriousness, if you are looking for a good guitar tuner, a lot of the ones on the market are actually not very good.
I highly recommend TC Electronic for clip-on tuner, or Sonic Research or Peterson for pedal tuners.
source: playing guitar for 32 years
I use a Peterson strobe tuner on my smartphone, it's really good. I've also coded my own strobe tuner to learn more, unfortunately no mobile version yet.
Could you go into more detail on why they are bad?
In my experience, electronic tuners suck at accurately detecting the note played.They often pick up harmonics as the note.
The low b on my 5 string bass is often identified as an f by electric tuners.
They also just aren't very accurate when they do detect the right note. I've never used a tuner where my cello is actually in tune when it says it is, always requires tweaking.
Innacarute, jumpy, slow response.
The most popular tuner of all time is the BOSS pedal, and the LED lights are too far part from eachother, it's simply not granular enough to really get in tune to my ears.
Stroboscopic tuners are the way to go
Agree that most leave something to be desired. TC Electronic polytune is great and I also use the pedal to mute my signal. I'm surprised to say this, but my favorite tuner is the one in the L6 Helix.
The oboe playing a concert A is a pretty good one too.
There is something magical about hearing an orchestra all tune up to eachother
I love my TC Electronic clip on tuner!
For $49 it's very, very good
The latency question is the interesting one here. Guitar tuning needs to be accurate to within a cent or two, and network jitter can easily throw that off. Curious how you handle it - are you compensating for round-trip delay on the server side, or is the assumption that the user is close enough to the server that it doesn't matter in practice?
I am not sure why this exists, but I am glad it does.
The website explains why this exists.
> Real guitarists use real tuners.
This reminds me of the Internet of my childhood. People just having fun and experimenting with a new medium. Thank you for sharing.
It looks like during the night all the light are off and in the webpage you only can see a led. But if you press "Star Tuning" most of the device illuminates and it's possible to use it. (An alternative is to wait 12 hours and see all the device.)
You're right! Terrarium LED incoming..
You keep your tuner in a terrarium?
”This appliance must be earthed”?
Wow deep cut <3
On my Pixel 10 using Chrome, it says "Mic needed - refresh to allow" but refreshing doesn't change anything. It's possible that I did something years ago to prevent whatever permission popup might normally be offered?
Your browser might have microphone access set to "Deny" by default rather than "Ask". This happened to my friend. He changed the setting and it worked, but maybe there's a way to give a more helpful error in this scenario. Let me see
Got the same, Firefox on lineageos.
This is hilarious and fun. Thanks for making it.
That’s some serious out of the box thinking
Very cool idea, but unfortunately the browser doesn't allow users to select which channel of their audio interface to use as input. So unless you're plugging your guitar into input 1 this doesn't work out. I have my microphone in input 1 and my guitar in input 2.
this is hilarious. and surprisingly responsive! i used this to tune an acoustic bass guitar i have
Thanks. Just tuned my daughter's guitar.
Obviously a bit more work. But it'd be pretty neat to have live reactions. "So close!", "Nearly there", "You can do it!", "Perfect" etc.
Unbelievable, thank you and can you add open g or drop d tuning pweez?
Can't it already do those since it's chromatic?
I guess he would have to add a way to interact with the tuner's UI to switch to a different setting other than standard tuning.
It’s a chromatic tuner, there is no other setting
Ah yes, my bad!
Thank you, this was fun, I sang notes for a bit :)
I have a tuner that attaches to the head of my guitar. I am not sure when I would need something like this.
This is fantastic. I have a TUF-3 but to use one to tune an acoustic was a real trip :)
Guitar tuner as a service was not on my 2026 bingo card but here we are. Creative project!
Tuned my guitar and donated 5$!
Love this. Very creative. I just tuned my guitar and it worked fine
Pretty wild, nice job
I just used it to check my whistle tones. How fun!
\m/
Tried it, dope idea. No Pi or tuner req'd really. Why we all love these goofy hacks so bad
This guy tunes!
love this, just tuned up a guitar.
I love it
sooo cool!