Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Novel Piano Tuning App

Pianofish, today I performed more tests on various iPads and I can now understand your problems of unwanted dismissals. In build 602 I disabled dismissing via swiping or taping outside of the page sheets.

Time to celebrate! After 16 months of development and nearly three months of beta testing with you guys, Apple finally approved v1.0 of pianoscope and I released it to the App Store today.

Thanks again to all of you for your great feedback and inspiration! The current public beta version you have been using will continue to work for 7 days. But I will keep improving pianoscope and will add more features in the future. So stay tuned to the TestFlight channel for future beta versions or follow @pianoscope_app on Twitter ( https://twitter.com/pianoscope_app ). And I am also always available here in the forum.

If you have come to like pianoscope, I would be very happy if you spread the word or if I could welcome you as customers. And if you are happy with the app, please rate it in the App Store, or even leave a review. This is a great way to support us indie developers.

You can download pianoscope from the App Store via this link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pianoscope/id1529249459?platform=iphone

After the download you can again get 14 days of free trial for the pro edition.

The version currently in the app store seems to have a problem validating the start of the trial against the app store. I am looking into this and will hopefully find a solution to this soon.

Apple has already updated the store configuration and the trial version of pianoscope is now again working as expected. Please excuse the inconvenience.

Thank you for sharing this Ron. I tried this on my Yamaha U1 and found intervals to be very clean and nicely stretched. It seems indistinguishable from equal temperament, but the piano sounds a little louder than normal, as if there is extra resonance. The result is quite nice across the entire range of the piano.

If you don't mind, can you recommend a temperament and settings for someone desiring a little key color? When tuning EVBT III with "balanced" tuning style, something about the stretch doesn't sound correct to me. I sense dissonance when playing notes below F2, and there is excessive beating with single octaves in the low bass. Although the midrange is fine, EVBT III doesn't seem as conducive to electronic tuning, at least with default settings.

If the octaves pure stretch worked well for you, just go up a couple of steps in my variable temperament. I have a number of teachers that prefer the KV 2.1 for their studios.

The numbering system refers to the maximum offset from ET.

Ron Koval

That fixed the usability issues for me. Thanks for being so responsive.


Congratulations, Frank! And you have my best wishes for pianoscope's success.

I have been delighted with the nice results your app has produced for me. It has convinced me of the value of a professional-quality ETD for the hobbyist.

Ron, thank you for the suggestion. I wish to try something slightly milder than EVBT III. From Jason Kanter's charts, KV 2.9 looks to be comparable strength to EVBT III. I'll try the next level down which is KV 2.1.

That is a very logical numbering system. I confused them for version numbers. It all makes sense now.

Good luck! I worked a lot with spreadsheets and the resulting strengths all had some synchronous beating between M3/m3 in a major triad - if I remember correctly... That's what I aiming for when developing those.

It is the same temperament, scalable to different strengths - it should make retuning stronger or weaker pretty easy.

Ron Koval

Hello Frank, the app works very well. If I would like to have anything else, then the time and battery display in iPhone landscape format.

Best wishes
Burkhard

Thank you.
I am aware of the missing status bar but I have not found a working solution to this problem as it is the iOS default to hide it in landscape orientation. But I am working on it.

Hi everybody,
today I have updated pianoscope to version 1.1 which contains the following new features:

- As requested, you can now configure the tuning view header on iPhones to show the current time and battery charge when in landscape orientation.
- The fields shown on the left and right hand side of the tuning view header can now be arranged in a custom order.
- I added a new button to the instrument settings dialog which saves the chosen concert pitch, tuning style, temperament and range as the default for new instruments.
- I added a new item to the menu for switching between fine and coarse tuning in the inharmonicity view. It saves the chosen selection as the default for new tunings.
- The app now also runs in Italian.

You can get the update via the App Store. Have fun tuning with it!

Frank, I noticed a couple more issues. First, if you go to the Tuning Curve view while the app is in portrait mode, only the left half of the tuning curve is visible and it is not possible to scroll right to view the rest of it. If the device is subsequently rotated to landscape and back to portrait, then scrolling works.

Second, the note detection in the high treble doesn't perform as well as I would like with moderate amounts of background noise. For example, with a quiet conversation taking place in the same room, pianoscope can easily detect B5, but F#6 needs to be pressed 5 or 6 times for the app to detect the attack and show the strobe. This is not a serious issue as I usually tune in a quiet environment, but I am curious if pianoscope is expected to work under these conditions.

Thanks for reporting this. I currently cannot reproduce it. What iPhone or iPad are you using?


I have put a lot of effort in dealing with background noise. However, the fewer partials a note has, the harder it is to differentiate it from background noise. I will look into this issue.

The bug was noticed on an iPhone 12 Pro Max. The same bug also occurs on the Inharmonicity screen. The issue doesn't exist on iPad because the display is big enough to accommodate all 88 notes in portrait orientation.

To reproduce: start from the Tuning View in portrait orientation. Use the menu to view Inharmonicity or Tuning Curve. On this particular device, A0-C3 are initially visible. At this point one can swipe to view notes as high as A#3 (Inharmonicity) or G3 (Tuning Curve), but no further. Changing the orientation to landscape displays all 88 notes. Rotating back to portrait shows A0-C3, but one can now swipe to get all the way up to C8.

It's also a problem with "Measure Inharmonicity" if the device remains in portrait the whole time. Although it measures up to C7, past a certain point (A#3) there is no visual feedback showing the iH measurement progress for each note.

Portrait mode works perfectly. Why not just use that?

Thank you, pianofish, for the detailed description. I can reproduce it now and will investigate it further.

Check out version 1.1.2 I have just released. The issue should be fixed.

I have uploaded a test build of the upcoming version 1.2 of pianoscope. If you are already on TestFlight it will offer it to you, otherwise you can join via this link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/qIzcnoY8

If you have already purchased the app store version but have not used a TestFlight build before, you need to perform one of the purchases in the test build. But this will only result in a test transaction and does not charge you any money, as the dialogs will tell you.

New Features:
- Tuning instruments with extra bass keys down to C0 (like the Bösendorfer Imperial 290) is supported.
- The number of moving strobe blocks can be adjusted in the general settings.
- The expiry date of the trial and beta periods are now shown in the tune view header.
- The indicator textual pitch display settings now have the additional option "Always Except For Concert Pitch"

Changes:
- The temperament and range instrument settings are now available in pianoscope standard.

Fixed Issues:
- Swiping on the rows for extra bass and treble stretch in the tuning curve view led to a crash.

If anyone has access to a Bösendorfer with extra bass keys, I would be interested to know if it works in real life. So far I have only tested it with recordings.

Have fun!

Many moons ago Frank asked if someone with an M1 Macbook could try and run pianoscope. Now that it's released into the app store, it's possible to download it.

So I tried it out today and found that it does, indeed work. A couple of small differences due to the way MacOS accesses the filesystem compared to iOS, but it did run. The window size was completely resizeable and could be full-screened too. In-app purchases also worked so this means that anyone without an iOS device but a new M1-based Macbook can use it. The larger screen is also good for use older folks and not having to have a stand for the device is also a plus! No problems reusing tuning files from the iOS version either - saving them to iCloud made it straightforward to get them from the iOS world into the Mac.

Currently, it's only the released (1.1.2 build 646) version that's available, not the 1.2.0 Frank announced above.

Paul.