FOSSPicks

Piano tuner

Entropy Piano Tuner

If you're lucky enough to have a real physical piano made of wood and strings, you'll know that it typically needs regular maintenance. In particular, a piano needs to be tuned, and unlike a guitar, tuning a piano isn't a simple task. There are 88 keys, and each key has multiple strings that need to be tuned to a specific tension, all the while keeping a keen ear for any extra harmonics or vibrations from other keys, strings, and the frame within the instrument. It normally takes a skilled piano tuner an hour or two to keep your piano in the best shape, and this can be expensive. Entropy Piano Tuner isn't a replacement for those skills, but it is a huge help if you have one or two keys that go out of tune before the others, or if you want to learn the dark art of piano tuning yourself.

The process starts by creating a new file for your specific piano. With that done, the application defaults to an idle mode that constantly listens to your microphone input, automatically detecting the pitch of any notes you play. If the levels seem good for this pitch detection, you then switch to Record mode. Now you can patiently record an audio signal from every key on your piano, which takes around 30 minutes. As you record, a spectrogram of frequencies is produced for each key, and a little tick on the GUI shows its successful status. With that done, you press Calculate, and the application will generate a tuning curve for your piano. A nice feature here is that you can connect a MIDI keyboard and play your tuned piano samples to make sure the recommended curve sounds accurate. If it does, the final mode is Tune. In this mode, you play a key and Entropy Piano Tuner shows you both the current pitch, and the pitch it needs to be, which you adjust with your piano tuning tool. Do that for every key, and you have a tuned piano and extra money in your pocket!

Project Website

http://piano-tuner.org/

As you record each key from your piano, a small tick mark is placed above the keyboard so you can see which keys you've yet to record.

Internet radio

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • FOSSPicks

    Graham looks at Graphite, retrogram~rtlsdr, Piano Forte, OneTrick SIMIAN, The Command Line Murders, and more!

  • Kodi 18.0 and LibreELEC 9.0

    Thanks to Kodi 18.0, LibreELEC 9.0 now supports the DRM encryption used by many streaming services. However, integrating Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services does involve some manual work.

  • FOSSPicks

    This month Graham fires up MuseScore 3.0, hexyl, weborf, Chrono, and several other useful Linux tools.

  • Neural Networks

    3, 4, 8, 11… ? A neural network can complete this series without knowledge of the underlying algorithm – by a kind of virtual gut feeling. We’ll show you how neural networks solve problems by simulating the behavior of a human brain.

  • Doghouse: Player Piano Rolls

    maddog finds out that copyright prevents preserving paper player piano rolls.

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News