Strobe Tuner for Mac

User Reviews

• Great tuner

  WashburntabuJanuary 13, 2009

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I've been trying to find a good tuner for my Washburn guitar with the Feiten tuning system. I need a tuner with strobe and a cent display with accuracy less than a cent. Out of the tuners on this site for os 10.3.9 this is by far the best. It's very accurate and I am now able to tune my guitar to +- 1 cent. Better software would cost $100 or more. This is so fast that the cent readout changes before I can see what the number is, when I get closer to 00 cent the readout becomes more accurate and settles down. Awesome product!

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• best tuner I've ever had

  Allen McBrideOctober 3, 2008

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I play hammer dulcimer, one of the hardest instruments to tune this side of a piano. Hardware strobe tuners are way too expensive for me, so I've always tried to make do with fluttering needle and LED tuners. About half an hour after downloading Strobe Tuner, I had my instrument in better tune than I think it has ever been. As far as I can recall from the last time I used a hardware strobe, this program works just as well and is easier to read. The program has an LED-style display as well, but I recommend ignoring it except to remind yourself how great it is to have a strobe tuner. You might want to save the readme file that comes with the download; it's the main documentation, but as far as I can tell it isn't included in the application itself. Not that you'll really need it, as the application is simple and straightforward. One disadvantage of any software tuner is that it can't be used with the unamplified clip-on mic that has helped me isolate my instrument in noisy settings when tuning before a gig. But so far this hasn't bothered me, because with the strobe tuner, I can get my dulcimer in such close tune at home that even after it settles in to the gig environment, it's still in better tune than if I'd tried to tune at the gig with my LED tuner. I downloaded Strobe Tuner in part because of the preset temperaments... while I'm still curious to try them, I've learned that a lot of what I thought was my frustration with equal temperament has actually been my frustration with inadequate tuners. Strobe Tuner is now the only non-free commercial software I own, and it's well worth the price.

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• Fantastic!

  amuletmusicFebruary 19, 2007

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />This tuner is the best I've used for setting up intonation on my guitars and right up there with the Peterson strobe of old. Runs perfectly! Thanks for a great product! A good deal at the registration price...

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• Awesome for tuning guitars!

  slow.spaceMarch 25, 2006

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />This is an absolutely fantastic little tuning app, which no Mac guitarist should be without. Its "strobing" tuning method is far more accurate than the traditional "needle" tuning meter. I have tried many programs to tune my acoustic guitar, but they all used the "needle" method, which has significant drawbacks. It relies on the ability to "lock" onto the repeating pattern of the sound waveform, in order to produce a reading of the frequency. If a guitar string created a perfectly-repeating waveform, this wouldn't be a problem. However, the actual waveform shape produced by a guitar string is continually evolving, and many programs have difficulty maintaining the "lock". The result is that the tuning "needle" often dances about, and the user has to determine its average position by eye. This app uses a totally different method, known as strobing. Once a coarse estimate of the required note has been made, the input sound is "strobed" (sampled) at the frequency of the "perfect" note (ie. the note which is perfectly in tune). If the input note is flat/sharp, the strobed image drifts to the left/right. Once the image becomes stationary, then the input note is perfectly tuned. It's so easy to use - just watch the pattern of blue/white stripes in the strobing bar as you tune the string. The principle is the same as using a strobe light to inspect the timing of spinning mechanical components (eg. in a car engine). You can achieve greater tuning accuracy than with "needle" tuners, because the human eye is much better at detecting drifting motion (in the strobing bar) than averaging the position of a varying needle. Another nice feature is that it allows you to tune a string to any note (not just EADGBE). I was so impressed with the trial version that I registered it within about 10 minutes of downloading it! I would thoroughly recommend it to all guitarists, especially those who've become disillusioned by other software tuners. It's true that the unregistered version does produce nag messages quite often, but this seems quite reasonable to me, since it's a very worthwhile little program, and the registration fee is amazingly small. The only negative comment I have is that I would've liked to see a bit more documentation about how the strobing actually works (eg. what the blue stripy bar actually represents). I guess that the bar is indicating a cross-section of the strobed waveform, with blue/white indicating whether the waveform is above/below the zero level, but it'd be nice to see an official explanation of the mechanism! By the way, the documentation says that v1.2 needs "Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later", but it runs fine on my PowerBook G4 @ 400MHz with OS 10.3.8. PS. I'm in no way affiliated with the author of this program :)

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