Guitar tuner?

[SosolidCrew]

I`v used my Sansa e250 Rockbox as a guitar microfone for some time now.
Simply connecting a line cable from  the earphones connector straight into my mixer. Running it trough a guitar amp vst plugin on my comp.
Works like a dream, adjusting the record levels straight on the sansa with the scroll wheel.
So my question is if it would be possible to implement a guitar tuner into rockbox? Would be a fantastic tool for the guitar players out there.
Cheers and thank god for Rockbox!

[MarcGuay]

Looks like one has already been coded, it just needs some fine-tuning.   

http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/8768

[SosolidCrew]

Thanks for the link! Keeping an eye on this one

[delt]

Why not just put an mp3 that plays a long A440? That would act pretty much the same as a tuner, except you need to listen to the earphones.

[LinusN]

Why not just put an mp3 that plays a long A440? That would act pretty much the same as a tuner, except you need to listen to the earphones.

While that is an option, it is not at all like a tuner.

The Rockbox guitar tuner does the frequency analysis for you  and tells you when you are correct. Just playing a 440Hz tone leaves all the work to the user, and then what would be the point of having a guitar tuner plugin in the first place?

[darkham]

something new about?

[Chronon]

The work in this task has been committed in r22663, r22685 and r22753.

http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/rockbox-sansae200/rockbox-buildch11.html#x14-29900011.4.13

[Datman]

The Rockbox guitar tuner does the frequency analysis for you  and tells you when you are correct.

I've tried it. It looks very good, but it appears to be not much accurate...

[Chronon]

I haven't tried it yet myself.  Some guitar tuners work better if you sound the 2nd harmonic of the string you're trying to tune (i.e. touch the string at the 12th fret to force a node there).  This tends to kill off a lot of extraneous overtones and gives the tuner a purer tone to work with.  (No idea if you tried this or if you're using a guitar or not, just throwing this out there.)

[Datman]

I've tried it with a classic guitar. The reference is a WST-550G Cherub clip tuner:
http://www.cherubtechnology.com/product_list.php?page=2&id1=32&id2=
It works very well.

[GGGGGG]

I've tried it. It looks very good, but it appears to be not much accurate...

That's probably because the microphones in portable devices aren't very good, and because you can't hold the instrument exactly near the device, the sound is already slightly distorted before it reaches the mic.

The best way to tune an instrument still is by doing it by ear, and don't let any of these technological things mess everything up.

[Datman]

The best way to tune an instrument still is by doing it by ear, and don't let any of these technological things mess everything up.

I agree, but sometimes there is a lot of noise/music, then a tuner like the Cherub is very useful. Also if the guitar is very out of tune a tuner is useful to begin the task. With my surprise the clip Cherub is more accurate than other ones; also doing an ear verify tuning is OK.

[Army]

I haven't tried it yet myself.  Some guitar tuners work better if you sound the 2nd harmonic of the string you're trying to tune (i.e. touch the string at the 12th fret to force a node there).  This tends to kill off a lot of extraneous overtones and gives the tuner a purer tone to work with.  (No idea if you tried this or if you're using a guitar or not, just throwing this out there.)

Most, if not all tuners work better this way, because this way the guitar produces a much clearer tone. The problem with this "solution" is, that the body doesn't swing the same way it does, when you hit the strings like you do when you play. So you might have a perfectly tuned guitar according to the tuner, but in reality it's not.

[Chronon]

Most tuning methods have certain problems.  It's simply impossible to tune the guitar so that it's in tune for all keys.  If this method doesn't work for you then it's probably best to just use a reference tone (e.g. a tuning fork), tune a string to that and then reference all other strings to this string (via your method of choice) by ear.  However, this strays a bit off topic for these forums. 

As to the plugin, I had a brief play with it but probably need to carefully check what effects the different options have on its performance.  I found the default behavior a bit finicky and I had to strike and tune quickly to get reliable results.  Still, it seems like it could work okay to get a single string on pitch and then tune (by ear) the rest from there.