Hate this:
Actually there’s a lot of piano tuning apps, and maybe that’s not a bad thing?
Does anyone know if those prices are fair or total b******* for a piano tuning app?
I mean a pianotuneR (as in a guy that tunes your piano) is pretty expensive.
These apps seem to be marketed as tools for professional piano tuners. And looking just at the screenshots it looks like it has a lot of tools and features outside of just showing the correct pitch.
If tuning pianos is your profession, paying 999$ once and writing it off as a business expense isn’t that far fetched.
(Better be a bloody useful tool though ;) )
I’m 99% sure that a professional piano tuner would be better served with a dedicated tuning device than a $999 Android tuning app.
Well, you can’t just use any tuner app for tuning a piano, basically because intervals (multiple simultaneous notes) on pianos are always slightly out of tune and we just try to approximate them as well as possible (via a tuning system called “12-tone equal temperament”).
If you’d tune each individual note to be perfectly in tune according to a normal tuner, then intervals would sound horrible (unless you’d only ever play in C Major, I believe).
But yeah, it’s definitely still a matter of the user base being niche and the users making money when using your app.
Have you had the chance to try out any of these piano tuning apps? Would any of them be useful? Piano tuners?
I have not, no. The above is kind of just random nerd knowledge I have from being a musician and having friends who play the piano.
In principle, I don’t see why you couldn’t just tune one of the notes with a regular tuner, and then tune all the rest relative to it, according to equal temperament. The most complex part about that would be the UI, to explain to the user which keys they have to press when.
But yeah, maybe I’m missing something hugely important about the process, for which you need all those fancy graphs that are shown in the app screenshots…
What’s funny is that I play the tuba and trombone, which are perhaps the two (non-percussion) instruments that need the least amount of tuning.
The above nerd knowledge is mainly necessary for banter between musicians, so that I can explain to them why a brass band sounds better, objectively. 🙃
So, the most expensive iOS apps are complicated applications aimed at professionals, while the most expensive Android apps are all junk apps aimed at rich people.
