The estimable Peter Kirn @ CDM has a link up to an on-line guitar tuner that looks pretty elaborate. I can’t really test it out myself since my music rig is kept far away from the internet and all the attendant software goes with keeping it connected cleanly. But it got me thinking about my go-to software tuner, APTuner.

Sonar has a tuner plugin included but to be honest I find it doesn’t grab my signal cleanly enough to be very reliable – i.e. it sometimes takes several heavy plucks before the “LED” begins to dance, and once it does it goes away too quickly. (This problem may be less with my new audio interface where I can independently crank the gain of the inst-level input.) But since you can add additional programs through the tools menu, it’s easy enough to wire the stand-alone APTuner to Sonar. (If anyone needs instruction in this let me know and I’ll whip up a post.)

It’s got a large display needle, that is sensitive and accurate and it’s easy to select from the alternate tunings.

However when I went digging for a link I discovered that I had been using the v1.0 line of the shareware. It’s gone through a few revisions. Somewhere along the line it got married to the Windows GDI+ and it doesn’t look quite the same.

I’m not sure how I feel about it, and since I just downloaded it myself, I can’t attest to the functionality being as good. But I do plan on giving it a spin, and if they didn’t ruin it in the process I’ll kick up a few bucks to the developers. If not, I’ll stick with v1.00 which works a treat for me.

Oh yeah, Windows only apparently. But if I’m remembering correctly there is a pretty slick tuner for the Mac; maybe one of those widget things.