Chromatic Tuner

A chromatic tuner for Obsidian, with instrument modes and microphone input selection.

Features

• Instruments: Chromatic, Tenor banjo (CGDA), Irish tenor banjo (GDAE), Guitar (EADGBE), Bass (EADG), Cello (CGDA), Mandolin (GDAE), Violin (GDAE).
• Input selection: pick which microphone to listen on. The choice is remembered, and if that mic isn't connected the tuner falls back to the system default until it is.
• String modes: detects which string you're tuning automatically, or tap a string to lock onto it (handy when a string is badly out and would otherwise read as its neighbour).
• Needle and cents readout: green inside the in-tune range, yellow when close, red when off.
• Input level meter with a noise gate marker, so you can see the selected mic is actually hearing you.
• Settings for reference pitch (A4 = 415–466 Hz), in-tune range and noise gate.

Usage

Click the waveform icon in the ribbon, or run Chromatic Tuner: Open tuner from the command palette. The tuner opens in the right sidebar and starts listening. Press Stop (or close the panel) to release the microphone.

Choosing a microphone

The laptop's built-in mic is usually the best choice:

• Noise-cancelling earbuds and headsets process their mics for speech, which can gate out or smear sustained notes.
• On macOS, using AirPods (or other Bluetooth headphones) as a mic switches them into a low-quality call mode for as long as the tuner is listening.

The tuner turns off the browser's own echo cancellation, noise suppression and auto-gain, but it can't turn off processing that happens inside a headset.

If input names show as "Microphone 1, 2…", start the tuner once: names are only available after microphone access is granted. On macOS, Obsidian needs permission under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone.

Privacy

All audio is processed locally on your device. Nothing is recorded, stored or sent anywhere: the tuner only analyses the live microphone signal while it's running, and releases the microphone when you press Stop or close the panel.

Development

npm install
npm run dev     # watch build
npm run build   # type-check and production build

To install manually, copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/chromatic-tuner/, then enable Chromatic Tuner under Settings → Community plugins.

Pitch detection uses the McLeod Pitch Method (normalised square difference function computed with an FFT-based autocorrelation) in src/pitch.ts.

Credits

Created by Damian Evans with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic).

License

MIT