There are many tuner apps available for the iPhone and not all were developed equally. Audio Tuner was developed by Supernifty and I’m happy to say that it is… super nifty! I love this tuner for a few reasons. First, it works! I tuned an acoustic guitar, a clean electric through an amp and was even able to tune an unplugged Les Paul! Then I compared with an expensive rack tuner that I have and it was right on the money! Nice! Another thing I like about Audio tuner is that is gives you a full spectrum analysis. So I can have this app on and sing a note and see the peak of the frequency on the app. This is such a great way to practice your pitch if you are a singer. I was fiddling around with this idea and really started to get into it.

There is a button called “Hear Note” that when turned on generates a tone to confirm the note you choose. On the frequency analyzer you will see a vertical line that says “Target”. This is your target note. If you try to sing the “Target” note and watch your voice’s frequency tracked, you will really start to see how this app could help a singer perfect his/her pitch. The developer doesn’t claim that this app should be used by singers, though. I was just commenting on the hidden potential of this little mini spectrum analyzer.

For the supported instruments, you pretty much use Audio Tuner the same as you would any other tuner. Whether you are tuning a guitar, ukulele, violin, piano, bass guitar, banjo, mandolin, autoharp or a cello, this app can do the job! Although I didn’t test it on all of these instruments, the developer claims that those are the instruments supported. I did test Audio Tuner with a Washburn D10S acoustic guitar, a few electric guitars, including a well intonated Les Paul and badly intonated American strat, a Fender bass, a piano and a few synths. They’ve never sounded better. With the synths I was just testing the accuracy of Audio Tuner itself, because we all know a sine, is a sine and they are always pitch perfect because they are a single frequency… this audio tuner passed with flying colors!

Gallery:

Verdict
Pros: Accurate! It’s a mini audio frequency spectrum analyzer. Simple to use and gets the job done.

Cons: I found no real negatives, but if I had one gripe I would say that the interface could be nicer. Compared to ClearTune, another tuner we will be reviewing shortly, Audio Tuner looks like OS9 vs OSX.

Features I Would Like To See: The ability to create custom tunings and specific target frequencies. It would also be neat to be able to turn a frequency grid on or off so that, when you sang, or noodled on the guitar for instance, you could see your notes intersecting with grid lines.

8/10

:: App Store Page :: $3.99
:: Web ::