It was 1994, me and me brother were into music and computers (in that order). It was the year we created a MIDI driver for Windows 3.1 (Windows 95 was still in beta at the time).

The device driver converted audio input to MIDI notes. We could directly record from line input to MIDI sequencer software. It effectively converted our regular electric guitar to a MIDI guitar, provided that we played single notes at a time.

It was a good start but certain things and life prevented us working more on it. Anyway, the pitch detection algorithm we used was something my brother worked on…

Back to 2010… Now that microphone data is accessible with Flash player 10.1, we decided to make use of the algorithm and provide a free online chromatic guitar tuner.

A quick search reveals that there are only a couple of similar online tuners with pitch detection but they are all Java. Ours is proudly Flash.

It’s not open source, but we encourage you to peek at the source, using AS3 Sorcerer…

1994 seems so back in the past now, ancient. Yet at the same time it feels it was a blink ago… We still do plug in our axes from time to time, actual C source of the 16 bit device driver is lost long ago, but the algorithm, XAMDF, lives on…

Hope you find it useful. Happy tuning…