14 ms·
Google adds a guitar tuner to Search
- maxmcd 5y agoShould the link be: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+tuner https://www.google.com/search?q=google+tuner
- forgotpwd16 5y agoIt seems they've have a few tools such as a metronome, a roll a die with multiple dies of different size, a coin flip. Even games: https://www.google.com/search?q=play%20snake https://www.google.com/search?q=play%20snake https://www.google.com/search?q=play%20minesweeper https://www.google.com/search?q=play%20minesweeper (this seems to work only when visited via one from the other links) https://www.google.com/search?q=play%20solitaire https://www.google.com/search?q=play%20solitaire
- JasonFruit 5y agoI know this is a bit of a tangent, but I'm getting tired of having everything good replaced by a mediocre version that offers debatable convenience. A meh guitar tuner, a phone tree that usually understands my spoken choices, the opportunity to enter my claim information online and be questioned by an impersonal overseas operator later instead of just talking with my agent — none of these are developments that improve my life, though they do a lot to help the companies that want my business. P.S. Get off my lawn.
- jholman 5y agoThat's disruption, in the sense intended by Clayton M. Christensen. Walmart was never going to provide a better service than Whole Foods (or some equivalent-to-WF store that predates Walmart, since I'm sure there are some). But it might provide a service that's 80% as good, at 20% of the price. And if it does, you might buy it. Are you under the impression that it's no longer possible to install a dedicated guitar-tuning Android app, or indeed that it's no longer possible to buy a dedicated guitar tuner?
- bjt 5y agoOK but, is Google really trying to disrupt the guitar tuner market? This isn't them trying to disrupt an incumbent. It's a neat hack from a company with more money than they know what to do with.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoThe top result on the Play store for "Guitar Tuner" is GuitarTuna, which is around 200 MB in size if memory serves me well. The second result's reviews indicate that it's full of extremely disruptive ads. So whatever Google is trying to do, for me it has disrupted that "market" by providing an easy-to-find, clean alternative.
- jcoq 5y agoI've been using Guitar Tuna for years. It's extremely effective and I don't really notice the ads.
- asdff 5y agoNo, but they want permission to use your microphone.
- xeromal 5y agoIt's most likely from Google's dev time program where a dev gets to work on a pet project 20%(?) of their time. That's why a ton of new projects come out of google but get canned in a few years.
- harry8 5y agoDoes that still exist as a policy?
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y agoThe policy still exists. The practice is dying out, however.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoThis is merely a result of the democratization of basic services- now everybody can receive the same level of mediocrity.
- JasonFruit 5y agoLike Andy Warhol put it: > What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
- egypturnash 5y agoAnd then Coke begat New Coke which begat “Old” Coke which was actually a new drink based on corn syrup instead of cane sugar and then people started importing cane sugar Coke from Mexico because they don’t have insane corn subsidies that make corn syrup stupid cheap compared to sugar and now, yeah, there is a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. Unless he, too, chose to spend like a buck thirty for a 12oz bottle of the Good Stuff at a store that has it instead of two bucks for a 20oz bottle of the corn syrup.
- zarzavat 5y agoI imagine this is just some Google engineer's 20% project, and that they are really enthusiastic about guitars. Also I can see this being useful in many cases, in case my battery was flat and I had to borrow someone's phone to tune up. I don't think that musicians will stop buying tuner apps because Google has one, a good tuner app is indispensable.
- smelendez 5y agoThey may also get some interesting data about microphone distortions across devices and browsers.
- analog31 5y agoI look forward to receiving personalized ads for books on how to improve my intonation. ;-)
- skybrian 5y agoI don’t think there’s anything about it that’s specific to guitars.
- asdff 5y agoMost musicians probably are using a clip on or chromatic tuner rather than their phone to be fair
- monkeybutton 5y agoWhere I work is all in on Google cloud and the "meh but convenient" factor of GCP services is starting to really grate on me. "X 3rd party service has great reviews and is cheaper" suddenly becomes contestable and a debate because we'd have to deal with a bit of additional complexity and pay for data transfer out of GCP.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThat’s the problem with tech giants. They tie you into a mediocre environment that makes it easy to use mediocre products . My company is using MS Teams because it comes with Office. But when you start to use it you quickly realize how bad it is. We would be much better off if we had more small tech companies instead of giants like Apple, MS and Google.
- dehrmann 5y agoI'm guessing you're looking at something like B2? Doing multi-cloud like that really is a hassle.
- lucas_membrane 5y ago> meh I agree. The in-tune reading is about plus/minus 5 cents (1 cent = 0.01 half steps). It is not nearly as precise or even as quick to determine the pitch as wtuner or lingot or the $14 D'addario clip-on tuner or even the korg vocal pitch trainer.
- mhh__ 5y agoBut who doesn't own one of those if they care? The last time I used a crummy app based guitar tuner was on a guitar at a friend's house that was basically a prop and no one played (so no tuner, also thank you Brian may for using a coin as a pick).
- yreg 5y agoA tuner built by people who are not you for people who are not you is not on your lawn.
- mkr-hn 5y agoWorkaround: You can force most of those phone trees into a failsafe button pressing mode by pressing 0 until it gives up on voice. You shouldn't have to play the system to make it work reasonably, but...
- smelendez 5y agoThe strange thing is, so far, you have to know about this to find it. If you just search "guitar tuner," it doesn't come up. You have to put "Google [instrument] tuner" with various instrument names or just "Google tuner."
- judge2020 5y agoProbably trying to build a case that they're just trying to compete, not steal traffic from existing sources via their position as the search provider.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- paulpauper 5y agoyou know what would also be great: less content-generated spam (top 10 ways to feel happy... blah bla) stop allowing sites to fool the 'sort by date feature' by changing the dates of old articles to new ones
- GreenWatermelon 5y agopretty much why I add "reddit" to most of my searches, and when I don't, I'm reminded why I do.
- analog31 5y agoOkay I'm pretty impressed. It registers my double bass, both plucked and bowed. A lot of Android tuners struggle with the bass. Of course I just granted Chrome access to my microphone. I'll be turning that back off, thanks.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- spcebar 5y agoPretty soon Google will be mowing my lawn but still won't serve me RSS.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago> still won't serve me RSS. Well to be fair, they could probably SLAM your lawn and add it to street view data. Whereas serving RSS has no clever telemetry/analytics for them to make any money out of (e.g. the death of Google Reader).
- tarunm 5y agoIsn't this another blatant case of Google abusing its position of being the gate-keeper of internet and pushing its feature above the websites that exists with the same feature for years? Same as it has been doing for things like online calculators, weather sites, currency conversions and so on. Worse is that they don't have to really play by the rules of SEO. Any other website with tuners or weather forecasts have to fill their content with keyword crap to get noticed even if they may not really add any value to end-user. But hey, Google can push it's nice little hobby feature to the top and bankrupt other legit websites. How is this legal? edit: Grammar
- tarunm 5y agoTo the downvoters: I would love to hear your counter argument and change my view.
- harry8 5y agoThe argument right now would likely be that it doesn't show up in the google search for "guitar tuner" and needs "google guitar tuner" to be found coupled with an assumption that this is how it will always be. It's a fair enough argument. But they should make it in response not just downvote like so many google employees not wishing to engage with a discussion about abuse of market power at all. I think I tend more toward your point of view personally, what is now isn't what will always be in search engine rankings etc, but there it is.
- asdff 5y agoOP does have a point but I think a better example is when google scrapes a truncated paragraph from a website and presents that.
- tarunm 5y agoAgree, I take back the specific example of tuner since it doesn't show up searching only for guitar tuner or such terms. But I still stand by other snippets.
- archsurface 5y agoTo encourage microphone access.
- mnemotronic 5y agocan it handle a c7sus4aug5 open tuning?
- C19is20 5y ago...by tuning up, or tuning down?
- titzer 5y agoAbout 20 years ago I bought my first digital guitar tuner, a Korg, that is about the size of a deck of cards. It had a monochrome LCD screen that mimicked an analog dial with a needle that moved to indicate flat or sharp. Years passed. Guitar tuning apps became a thing. I downloaded a few over the years. Then the one (free) one I had started showing ads. Little by little, update by update, the ads became more annoying, until one day it forced me to watch a 30 second ad before tuning my guitar. The one thing that I enjoyed to get away from computers and their....bother. That day I went out and bought 4...FOUR snark clip on tuners, and another Korg. I deleted that stupid app and have not looked back. I don't want to go back to sucky software apps replacing fully functional, well-designed single-purpose devices. There's just too much pull to make them into g****mn ad platforms. Google search also has a crappy metronome. It sucks. I use my analog metronome all the time.
- rglullis 5y agoF-droid shows at least a dozen different apps, none of them with ads. Even if the open source apps were not a perfect fit for your case, you could have taken 10% of the money you spent and made everyone's life better.
- titzer 5y agoClip-on tuners are just far superior. They use a piezo and are driven by vibration, which works in a noisy environment, like a stage. I probably would not have bought one if that crappy phone app had not pissed me off so much. Thanks crappy phone app!
- rglullis 5y agoI am not arguing that the analog/hardware version of a product is superior. I am arguing that, provided: - you were satisfied with the software version of a solution; - what drove you away from it was the ads, You could have solved the ad issue by looking at OSS alternatives, to which you had plenty to choose from. Saying that the HW version is better, when a (good version) SW was enough, smells of post-fact rationalization.
- brigandish 5y agoWhen Google was still "do no evil" this would've been cool. Now that they are, shall we say, ambivalent about such things, it's not, because I'd rather they worked on not invading my/everyone's privacy.
- locusofself 5y agoI think this is neat and may try it. For anyone looking for an excellent tuner app, Peterson iStrobosoft is the one.
- yzh 5y agoNow I can tell if my "claimed-to-have-perfect-pitch" friend is lying anywhere.
- squarefoot 5y agoIf I want a tuner, I've both one I keep over the amp or the small one I clip on the bass neck. They don't spy on me, don't show me ads, don't force me to keep the phone on and are much more responsive than any phone app. Also... sorry but my phone stays off when I play music, and it's not even a smartphone; at my age the time I can spend with friends enjoying playing music is not that much anymore, and the heck if I'm risking to ruin the experience with a phone left on.
- gorgoiler 5y agoA good v1. But these skeumorphic coloured VU LEDs seem like a missed opportunity for innovation. How about an enlarged stave-a-like with an ECG-style line on it, tracking my pitch over time, with an oversized vector showing the direction to the next half tone? By way of analogy: Google have made a decent enough spirit level, so now give us LIDAR.
- DevKoala 5y agoImagine letting your browser have access to your mic.
- squiggy22 5y agoInteresting that it only resolves on 'google tuner' rather than 'guitar tuner' searches.
- Kiro 5y agoClicking this thread I thought "at least this is something HN can't bash Google for" but of course I was wrong. You guys are really creative in your hate.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- makeitdouble 5y agoGoogle has a long history of: - getting into fields to offer a free product then discontinuing it - integrating random apps and services into its search and blocking more that half of search results pages with its own content. This seems to come straight into the second category. I mean, according to the article it was its own property on the side, living its life. You could eventually summon from the assistant if you wanted to, but they still had to bring it as a widget into the main search engine. Why.
- sixothree 5y agoI'm just getting tired of google search results not actually being search results.
- wjnc 5y agoMy initial thought was: "What a good way to dark pattern users into allowing Chrome to use the microphone". Tried it out and indeed using this on iOS 15 would give Chrome (seemingly permanent) microphone rights. So thanks, but no thanks. Thanks for the compliment of being creative in my hate.
- amelius 5y agoHow is this not abuse of power to get into the guitar tuner market? I hope they get sued by the tuner companies. And before you respond, think how you would feel if your service was "front-run" by Google upon a user search.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoSo Google can't do anything that's not a complete innovation?
- amelius 5y agoThey can, but they can't shove their own services in front of everybody else's in their search results.
- Cipater 5y agoIf you just search "guitar tuner," it doesn't come up. You have to specifically search for "Google guitar tuner"
- jobigoud 5y agoWhat about the calculator or unit conversion? I don't use Google myself but if this stuff is commodity I'm not sure why they couldn't shortcut the results. Users are still free to use something else if it adds value.
- wohfab 5y agoI obviously do not know their plans, but you (for now) have to search for "google tuner". So there's no "abuse of power" at all and nothing is "front-run" here.
- drw85 5y agoThis is exactly the problem with modern software. They don't stick to their tasks anymore, but implement all kinds of "utility"-things. The complexity and quality suffers big time, because instead of being a good piece of software highly optimized to do a few things really well, they all become massive assortments of useless utility crap.
- achenet 5y agoZawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. -circa 1997
- latte 5y agoIs there any app segment or niche safe from being killed by Google?
- wohfab 5y agoIsn't like most of those supposedly "killed" services just moved to or merged with other services?
- chinaev 5y agoI believe it's a bit of a disservice. People should develop a musical ear to tune their own instruments. Haven't been using tuners for about past five years. However my guitar does drift off a bit sometimes
- tantalor 5y agoCan anybody learn it? I thought many people were just tone deaf. Is it a myth?
- andrewzah 5y agoTuning off of a reference note isn't that hard, almost anyone can learn to do it. It's just more convenient to use the tuner for each string.
- rizzaxc 5y agoagree with you but you cant tune onstage/ with other instruments also tuning. the guitarist can't go "everybody shut up I'm tuning" like in the orchestra. and I believe in concert bands/ orchestras they also tune with equipments before going on stage
- yhoneycomb 5y agoBing has had an excellent one for years already
- streamofdigits 5y agoIs there any point to small (or medium) software enterprize anymore? If your niche can be disrupted by a handful of incumbents with enormous reach and access to user data at whim (even when there is hardly any money in it), imagine if it is actually a potentially lucrative domain To stick with the theme: can we recognize the screetching high pitch of the thin edge of a wedge? Tuning a guitar can be done by relatively simple (dumb) algorithms. Recognizing a chord and more sophisticated musical elements needs the feedback and "labelling" by a large number of willing participants. You can work out the rest of that "musical piece" yourself...
- chrjxnandns 5y agoI hate being that guy? But Bing had this 6 years ago https://blogs.bing.com/search/2015/09/02/bing-rocks-two-new-tools-for-the-everyday-musician/ https://blogs.bing.com/search/2015/09/02/bing-rocks-two-new-...
- tomcam 5y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=google+tuner https://www.google.com/search?q=google+tuner
- Jenz 5y agoLaughs in renaissance tuning methods, cheers from a lutenist.
- ladelfa 5y agoStares in harpsichordist. Those semitones seem pretty equal. Be a shame if something happened to them.
- lborsato 5y agoWhy is it that all I hear is “give Google access to your microphone”?