Support

Nitpitch is a hobby project, maintained in spare time. Bug reports and suggestions are welcome — the fastest route is a GitHub issue, or email ville@misaki.fi.

Using it

Play a note and the dial fills toward the side you’re off on: left is flat, right is sharp. In tune, the fill disappears and only the centre needle remains — nothing showing is the goal.

The row of lights underneath is the fine reading. They’re spaced logarithmically — ±2, 4, 8, 16, 32 cents — so there’s real resolution near the centre, where tuning actually happens, and just direction out at the edges.

Set the reference pitch with the − and + either side of the reading below the dial. Set the instrument from the menu at the top left; it narrows the frequency range being searched, which is what keeps a cello’s low C from being found as a violin harmonic. Chromatic searches the whole range and names whatever it hears.

It says “Play a note” and nothing happens

• Check the microphone permission. iOS: Settings → Nitpitch → Microphone. macOS: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone.
• Watch the level bar at the top of the screen. If it doesn’t move when you play, the app isn’t hearing anything — a different input device may be selected, or something else may have the microphone.
• Play a bit louder, or closer. Frames that aren’t confidently periodic are deliberately ignored rather than displayed, so bow noise and room reflections don’t make the readout flicker nonsense.

The reading jumps around

A little movement is the instrument, not the app — vibrato and bow noise both move the pitch genuinely. But:

• Two strings sounding at once will give an unstable reading that flickers between them. This includes an open string ringing sympathetically. Damp the strings you’re not tuning.
• A very slack string may read as an entirely different note. That’s correct — it is a different note — so keep raising it and the name will come round.

It disagrees with my other tuner

Check both are set to the same reference pitch first. An app at A=440 against one at A=442 will differ by about 8 cents on every note, consistently. That’s not an error in either one: it’s what those two references mean.

Which instruments are supported

Violin, viola, cello, double bass, guitar, and bass guitar, plus a chromatic mode that will name any note in range. The detector is the same for all of them; the instrument choice only sets the frequency range searched.

Nitpitch is built violin-first — that’s the case every default is chosen for — but nothing about it is violin-only.

Requirements

iPhone and iPad on iOS 16 or later, and Mac on macOS 14 or later. One purchase covers all of them, though there’s nothing to purchase: the app is free.

On the Mac, an electric instrument through an audio interface or DI usually gives a much cleaner signal than the built-in microphone, which is voice-processed and noisier than the detector deserves.