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Vlad, in build 433 I implemented your request: By swiping left or right in the scale area, you can switch to an adjacent key one semitone higher or lower. I will look into octaves switching later.

Thank you Frank!

During the set-up for a pitch raise, would it be possible to use "next" or "continue" to enter the top of the bass bridge, last wound string and strut location(s) rather than "done"? It makes us bounce back and forth between screens, when all the info is going to be entered.

A nice bonus would be to be asked to play each of the above notes, and have the software find and display for us!

For those of you playing along, I used the "octaves pure" setting on a Baldwin spinet and it probably sounded the best it ever has...

Ron Koval

OK, I understand. There is potential to save more time when preparing a pitch raise. I will think about it.


This can only work if the piano is less than 50 cents flat, otherwise the app cannot know which note you are playing. Would it still make sense for you to have it only for these cases?


Thanks, I am very happy about that!

Since most of my pitch raises are smaller - in the 10-20 cent range, I would use the "play these notes" option way more than the large pitch raises.

Ron Koval

OK. I like both ideas, so I implemented them in build 438:
You can now switch from one settings page to the next using the new "Next" button in the top right corner or alternatively, you can press the new record button and play the note on the piano. The state of the record button will be persisted, so that next time you enter the settings, recording will be immediately activated to save additional time.

Also I changed the scale gestures for fast note switching. They are now as follows:
- Tap on the right side of the tuning scale: semitone up
- Tap on the left side of the tuning scale: semitone down
- Swipe on the right side of the tuning scale: octave up
- Swipe on the left side of the tuning scale: octave down

SUPER! Wery conveniently.

Today I had some time to sit down at the piano and work on the reported bugs in the attack / note detection.

The freezing of the tuning indicator and strobe that some of you reported, should now be fixed with build 443. It only occurred if you were tuning the same note for more than 60 seconds. For the geeks: It was a bug in the marking of key attacks in the circular audio buffer.

And while I was at it, I also found a bug which made the automatic note detection much more nervous than it should be. When playing a new note, the app sometimes wrongly also analyzed a small part of the previously sounding note which could lead to the keyboard and note indicator jumping to an unrelated note for a short time. Now the automatic note detection is much calmer, the way it was meant to be.

Hello Frank, you are very efficient and quick!

I had some time yesterday and tuned a 4 year old Yamaha U1 that I regularly maintain. I already had a Verituner file for it. Since I have 2 iphones I decided to use pianoscope on one and verituner on the other. I used the balanced tuning. Pianoscope calculated the tenor and treble almost exactly the same, but the bass was sharper on certain notes by about 3 cents. Obviously I played around with intervals to see which tuning I preferred. And to my ears I preferred pianoscope. I am very impressed.

I am still not sure which display I prefer. I ended up using the strobe only. Having both the strobe and the indicator at the same time is too "busy" for my eyes. I would like to have a marker show the initial pitch, either below or above the tuning scale and maybe another type of indicator that could light up when within a cent of the desired pitch.

Thanks very much for an excellent app. I really like the speed that it takes measurements and be able to choose which notes to measure by just playing them. I am looking forward to trying it again on a large pitch raise.

Thank you. I try my best...


This is very interesting. I have just received an e-mail from a gentleman who tuned an old Bechstein model 9 upright with pianoscope. He also compared the tuning to the one from Verituner and found it to be sharper in the bass but unlike you he did not like the result. I hope I can get more details to analyze it further.


This sounds interesting. I have not put much effort yet into the strobe-only interface. What exactly do you mean with "a marker showing the initial pitch"? If there is no scale, would it be a textual indication? And how to you imagine the lighting-up-indicator? Also as a text?


I am happy to return the thanks. The great feedback here helps me a lot to improve the app.

I tried tuning today but the display response was sooooo sloooow as I started at A0 on a pitch raise. . After I got home today, there was an update (447) Hopefully, that will fix it!

I did restart the program, (swipe it away) but that didn't seem to change anything.

Ron Koval

Ron, I am sorry to hear this. But I worked on many things in the last days. Perhaps I broke something. What exactly was slow? Measuring inharmonicity? Measuring overpull? Note detection during tuning? Indicator / strobe responsiveness?

I have just tried the latest build here on my piano, and it seems to work fine.

With the TestFlight app you can always go back to older versions if you want to.

It was the indicator / strobe response. I'll check it tomorrow with the latest build and see if there is any difference.

Ron Koval

With build 443 I had indeed damaged something. This should now be fixed again with build 453. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Thanks - I had also updated the latest ios security patch that morning - not sure if that had any effect on the tuning.

Ron Koval

"This sounds interesting. I have not put much effort yet into the strobe-only interface. What exactly do you mean with "a marker showing the initial pitch"? If there is no scale, would it be a textual indication? And how to you imagine the lighting-up-indicator? Also as a text?"

Hello again,

Yes it could be textual, as in "starting pitch -12". For an indicator when in the 1 cent range, if you look at tunelab, just below the strobe there is a small grey bar that expands when within a cent.

Thanks

This would be possible, but I am looking for a more intuitive solution, something which can be easily understood without having to read textual labels all the time. The best idea I could come up with so far is the following:

I could add two new display options:
a) Scale On/Off: A switch which hides all scale ticks and numbers, and only leaves the zero tick in the middle.
b) Indicator/Strobe Threshold: A value in cents at which the display switches from the red indicator line to the strobe. If the current pitch deviation is HIGHER than the threshold, the red indicator is shown (on an empty scale if you have turned it off with switch a). BELOW the threshold, the indicator is hidden and the strobe takes over.

This would result in a very clean interface in which the indicator could give you a coarse orientation. And once you are near the tuning target, the strobe would do the fine work. But you would not have both at the same time.You could decide individually where this threshold should be, perhaps at one cent, or at three.
You could combine this with the pitch text feature which is already there: The text showing the current deviation would be attached to the indicator line and move with it, and it would fade out together with it once the strobe takes over.

I don't like the appoach of many different static numbers in the interface, because it is not intuitive to grasp which is the target value and which is the current value. One would need to put names besides the values and things would get cluttered pretty quick. I would like to keep the approach that the current value is attached to the indicator line, so its movement makes it intuitively clear that it is a current, changing value and not a fixed target.

These are just my current thoughts. As with every idea, I think we will need a working prototype to judge if it will work out. But it should not be too complicated. Perhaps I will find some time next week to try it.

If you have any further ideas you want to share, please let me know.

Thanks, I am looking forward to trying out those ideas!

One thing I liked in Tunelab was the spectrum display would really help when tuning reluctant unisons in the high treble as you'd see a peak for each string (if you were tuning more than one at once). The partial display currently is quantized to a semitone so you never get enough resolution to see. OK the strobe helps, but if you also have strings with false beats, it's sometimes hard to tell if one (or more) is sharp or flat of the target. With the Tunelab display you could usually identify which string you're moving and try and merge the peaks.

Paul.

Paul, I like that feature about TuneLab, too. I have something similar on my list for a later version of pianoscope. Although I would not put it in the partial spectrum view which is meant to deliver a coarse musical overview of ALL partials. It could be one of two things:

1) A special mode inside the tuning scale, replacing the red indicator with an excerpt from the spectrum like TuneLab does, focusing the area around a single partial onto the zero in the middle. This approach would have the downside, that one would lose the automatic averaging of multiple partials and one would have to pick the right partial. (Which would not be a problem for the high treble)

2) Or if I managed to reliably identify nearby peaks, I could simply draw multiple averaged indicator lines into the scale. And in a perfect world, the line of the string which has been moved recently would be highlighted.