I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust

#41

Post by bobajeff » Mon, Oct 10, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

zduny wrote: post #13

audio_stuff wrote: post #6

Looks very nice, would you tell us a little bit about what you used to build this? I am just getting started with Rust and it would be cool to hear what approach you went and what you would recommend when starting today.

Flutter for the UI. Rust for the listening, and pitch detecting backend. Connected the former with the latter using flutter_rust_bridge. More details on Rust backend: For listening (getting audio signal from microphone) I used: - Android: https://crates.io/crates/oboe - native desktop/iOS (not currently released): https://crates.io/crates/clap - Web: https://crates.io/crates/web-sys (so basically JS Web Audio API cal…

>Flutter for the UI. Rust for the listening, and pitch detecting backend. Connected the former with the latter using flutter_rust_bridge.

It's good to see that there is a active project to help with making Android apps using rust.

Re: I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust

#42

Post by planede » Mon, Oct 10, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

izietto wrote: post #29

KMnO4 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While $1 is certainly far less than the value this app provides, it’s going to be a hard sell when there are several free apps which do the same thing.

Yes, but to be fair it's awfully hard to find a free app that does the same without bloat due to any kind of ads. I'm going to buy this app just because of frustration due to that.

There are several such apps on f-droid.

Re: I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust

#43

Post by cge » Mon, Oct 10, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

jibbit wrote: post #30

lvl102 wrote: post #16

iStrobosoft is the best tuning app. No contest.

the idea of a 'virtual' strobe tuner is a curious one - a strobe tuner being such a material thing. I'm not contesting that Peterson's is the best, but the 'strobe' aspect of it has to be marketing guff, doesn't it?

There was one strobe-like tuner for Android years ago that seemed to be something other than a visual representation of a standard digital tuner.

My understanding of the way it worked is that it took the waveform over some set N/frequency time, converted it to a 1D horizontal line of black→white pixels, and then stacked subsequent lines to create a 2D image, with new lines being added at the top and moving down. In tune (or a multiple of the root frequency for the image), you'd see a series of vertical black and white bars; out of tune, these bars would slant to the left or right, and move over time.

This method was actually somewhat like a strobe tuner in mechanism, replacing the persistence-of-vision appearance of the bars moving with a spatial representation of the audio waveform moving in comparison to the reference frequency. Presumably, this could also have been done without the stacked 2D representation, but that doesn't seem to be what apps like iStroboSoft do, as the bars are far too clean and even. While the app didn't do it, harmonic partials could have been added by having multiple simultaneous 2D images, each with a different reference frequency.

Unfortunately, the app and its developer disappeared years ago, and while I might still have the apk somewhere. I haven't seen anything like it since.

Re: I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust

#44

Post by nu11ptr » Mon, Oct 10, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

account-5 wrote: post #33

This might have an obvious answer for the more experienced here, but (potentially stupid question) why didn't you use dart for this? Nothing against rust, just interested is all considering the dart/flutter relationship.

Speaking only for myself, I'm considering Flutter + Rust because I want to write everything in Rust, but there aren't great GUI options for Rust atm. I've heard good things about the rustdart bridge so it seems like a reasonable compromise, esp. given the Dart code to write Flutter UIs seems fairly declarative. Hoping to keep most of the logic in Rust and just the view in Flutter/Dart.

Re: I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust

#45

Post by zduny » Mon, Oct 10, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

zduny wrote: post #28

I don't know if it is allowed here: Please reply if you would be interested in free promo codes for the Android app, I will post some.

20 promo codes for the Android app:

[all codes have been redeemed]

Re: I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust

#46

Post by psychphysic » Mon, Oct 10, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

KMnO4 wrote: post #26

zduny wrote: post #2

It's available free (and no ads) for desktop browsers and as a $1 Android app (on mobile needs to be an app for performance reasons and I believe it's a fair price).

While $1 is certainly far less than the value this app provides, it’s going to be a hard sell when there are several free apps which do the same thing.

I agree. Although this might be more about covering development costs than making OP money.

An important distinction so many entrepreneurs fail to make. Don't enter a saturated market without anything new on the table if you intend to make money.

The problem with this particular market is that musicians can mostly tune by ear. Most will have a dedicated tuner next to their instrument and worst of all these apps don't perform as well for a variety of reasons not least of all that the response of the device might be off.

Re: I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust

#47

Post by drukenemo » Mon, Oct 10, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

lvl102 wrote: post #16

iStrobosoft is the best tuning app. No contest.

It is. It’s just a pity they haven’t updated it in a while.

Re: I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust

#48

Post by phdelightful » Mon, Oct 10, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

As an undergrad I made a guitar tuner using a PIC32 microcontroller to do time-series correlation to figure out the frequency (FFT was too slow for real-time) and a state machine embodied in a stratix FPGA to control a stepper motor to turn the pegs. A different era of “mobile app” I guess.

Re: I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust

#49

Post by icapybara » Mon, Oct 10, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

phdelightful wrote: post #48

As an undergrad I made a guitar tuner using a PIC32 microcontroller to do time-series correlation to figure out the frequency (FFT was too slow for real-time) and a state machine embodied in a stratix FPGA to control a stepper motor to turn the pegs. A different era of “mobile app” I guess.

Correlation is calculated using FFTs, so wouldn't that be just as slow?

Re: I made a guitar tuner app using Flutter and Rust

#50

Post by timeon » Mon, Oct 10, 2022, 2:34 PM UTC

n4bz0r wrote: post #38

account-5 wrote: post #33

This might have an obvious answer for the more experienced here, but (potentially stupid question) why didn't you use dart for this? Nothing against rust, just interested is all considering the dart/flutter relationship.

Quoted post unavailable.

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