Flutini

Introduction

Flutini is a program for analyzing pitch information for instruments like flutes in real time.  Unlike a traditional tuner, where you play a single note and watch a needle fluctuate around on a dial, Flutini listens as you play a tune, identifies the notes you're playing, averages all the "E"s and "G#"s and so on, and then tells you how sharp or flat you were on each note.  Just play a tune and you will get an honest assessment of your tuning under real playing conditions!  

Screen capture of Flutini interface

Using Flutini is pretty straightforward:  You click on "Start" and begin playing.  Flutini will show the notes that you've played and their average pitch. (C4 is middle C on the piano in scientific naming.)  Play until the average stops changing and click on "Stop."  Click "Start" again for a new trial.  For more detailed information, see the Tutorial.

Credits

Flutini was written by Scott R. Turner based upon Tartini, a music analysis tool written by Philip McLeod as part of his dissertation work at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and Polygraph, a tool created by Graeme Roxburgh and Terry McGee to take Tartini output and produce tuning charts.  Graeme Roxburgh and Terry McGee also provided help in creating Flutini.  Tartini, Polygraph and Flutini are all open-source software.

Download

An installation package for Windows can be downloaded here.  Simply unpack the zip file and click on "Flutini."  The source code can be downloaded here.

A version of Flutini for the Mac is now available. It has known issues with the latest OS versions and probably won't work.  We're waiting for someone to take on this development project and fix this for us.  Nevertheless, you may download it here.  After unpacking the file, you should have "Flutini.app".  Many thanks to Dan Gordon for providing this port to the Mac.  

Known Bugs  

  • The Flutini display will sometimes stop updating ("freeze").  You can force the display to update by temporarily making another window active.  Restarting will fix the problem.
  • Flutini will sometimes crash on exit or at other random times.

Using Flutini with Polygraph  

Flutini exports data in the same format as Tartini, so you can use Flutini as the data source for Polygraph.   Polygraph provides some additional functionality for analyzing the note data -- see Polygraph to learn more about Polygraph's capability.

Comments, Suggestions, Questions

If you have bug reports, comments, suggestions or questions, feel free to contact Scott Turner.