obsidian-chromatic-tuner

Tune your instrument without leaving Obsidian. Pick guitar, bass, tenor banjo, mandolin, violin or cello and the tuner shows which string you're playing and how far off it is. If a string is badly out, tap it to lock on. Chromatic mode tunes any note.

You choose which microphone it listens on, and all audio stays on your device.

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