Jim's Depository

this code is not yet written
 

I’ve been working on a musical instrument tuner for the iPhone. Sadly, I was not one of the lucky 500 first round of developers accepted by Apple, and have been excluded from the market.

At some point when Apple decides my \$100 bill is good enough to let me into the market my application would be starting far back in the pack, behind whichever one of these first, blessed three gains the title as “the tuner you use on an iPhone”.

Given that handicap, I’ll probably not release the application, but it was interesting writing it. Among the things I discovered:

  • Pitch is subjective for some sounds. There are notes on the concertina I was using for some of the testing for which the human testers disagreed about the octave of the note. (And my algorithms were also having trouble making a decision.)
  • For many instruments, the fundamental is not strongly present in the spectrum. Going in, I had assumed it would be large, if not the largest component.
Oh cruel Apple. 12 hours after releasing the Apple Store they processed my application and sent me a key to test on my iPhone.

Decisions.