what's the frequency, kenneth?

Today was mostly spent working on a new project. An online guitar tuner.

I don’t have relative/perfect pitch, so I can’t tune my guitar by ear, even if I can hear the correctly tuned tones. Every online tuner I’ve seen plays these tones for you to tune to.

So I decided to develop a visual tuner. One that works just like a hardware tuner, with a VU meter and everything:


When it’s launched, you’ll be able to just go to the website from any computer or mobile device, and the tuner will pick up and process your default audio device. There are no confusing audio routing or device setting options, etc.

My friend Sam wrote the Javascript coding, and I did all of the interface design.

Today I gave ten people the chance to beta test it. Kristina Horner was the first, and she absolutely loved it. The tuner also worked perfectly for seven other people. One person had trouble getting their browser to recognize the incoming audio signal. And one other person’s connection was too slow, which caused the browser to lose the incoming streaming audio and flicker the tuner image.

For our first round of testing, an 80% success rate isn’t too bad.

The beta team had some solid suggestions on features they’d like to see (as beta teams almost always do) so, after a few more days of testing and upgrading, I should be ready to launch the tuner for public use. (If you visit the URL now, the site is not live, it will simply forward you to one of the other sites I host.)

I don’t expect this project to bring in any serious income outside of AdSense and affiliate ads on the page around the tuner, but I’m excited for it nonetheless. The time spent developing this, and the money spent hosting it and its bandwidth will be paid back with its coolness factor. This tuner is something I will actually use, and something I’d guess others would find useful as well.

I’ll post about it again when the site goes live.