Audio tools
8 tools that run in your browser. Nothing to install, nothing uploaded.
Chromatic and guitar tuners that listen through your microphone and work the pitch out in your browser — no app, no account, and nothing recorded or uploaded. They report cents against the nearest note rather than a green light, because being in tune is a tolerance and not a state: a few cents sharp is inaudible on a single note and obvious in a chord. Audio is captured with the browser’s own processing switched off wherever it can be, since noise suppression and automatic gain control are tuned to flatter speech and will happily distort the steady tone a tuner needs to measure.
- BPM TapperTap along to find a track's tempo, using the median so early taps stop counting.
- dB / Sound Level MeterA level meter that reports dBFS honestly, because a browser cannot measure sound pressure level.
- Guitar TunerTune a guitar by ear-free measurement — cents, not colours, and no app.
- MetronomeA metronome scheduled on the audio clock, so it does not drift the way browser timers do.
- Instrument TunerA chromatic tuner for any instrument — note, frequency and cents.
- Pitch DetectorDetect the pitch of any sustained note, in hertz and in cents from the nearest note.
- Tone GeneratorGenerate a pure tone at any frequency, with the waveform and level under your control.
- Noise PlayerPlay white, pink or brown noise — and see why pink is usually what you actually want.
Cents, not colours
A tuner that shows a green light is answering a yes-or-no question that does not have a yes-or-no answer. Pitch accuracy is a continuous quantity, measured in cents — hundredths of a semitone — and where the tolerance sits depends entirely on what you are doing. Around five cents is inaudible on a single sustained note and quite audible in a held chord, and instruments drift as they warm up and as strings settle. Reporting the actual deviation lets you decide, and lets you see the difference between a string that is settling in one direction and one that is simply hard to hear against.
Why the browser’s audio processing gets switched off
Echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain control exist to make speech intelligible on a call, and every one of them is actively harmful to a measurement. Noise suppression treats a steady tone as background and attenuates it. Automatic gain control changes the level continuously, which destroys any amplitude reading. Echo cancellation can cancel part of the signal outright. These tools request the raw stream with that processing disabled wherever the browser allows it — and where the operating system applies its own enhancement below the browser, the honest result is a measurement to treat with more caution.
Getting a reliable reading from a laptop microphone
A built-in microphone is usually good enough to tune with, given a little care. Play one note at a time and let it ring rather than strumming, because a chord gives the detector several fundamentals to choose between. Get reasonably close and keep the room quiet — a fan, a fridge or a television gives a pitch detector something else to lock onto. Expect low notes to be harder: the bottom string of a bass guitar is near the limit of what a small laptop microphone reproduces, and if a reading jumps around by an octave that is almost always harmonic confusion rather than a mis-tuned instrument.
Frequently asked questions
Is a browser tuner accurate enough for a real instrument?
Yes, for tuning. Pitch detection in a browser measures the frequency accurately enough to report within a cent or two, which is well inside what matters for playing — and it reports the deviation rather than a green light, so you can see whether a string is settling. The weak link is the microphone and the room, not the arithmetic: a quiet room and one note at a time will beat a better tuner used carelessly.
How close to in tune do I need to be?
Within about five cents is inaudible on a single sustained note and quite audible in a held chord, so the tolerance depends on what you are playing. Instruments also drift as they warm up and as new strings stretch, which is why a reading that keeps sliding in one direction usually means the string is still settling rather than that you missed. Retune after a few minutes of playing.
Why does the reading jump around or show the wrong octave?
Usually harmonic confusion — a pitch detector locking onto an overtone rather than the fundamental — which is most common on low notes and with a small laptop microphone that reproduces the fundamental weakly. Play one note at a time and let it ring rather than strumming, get closer to the microphone, and quieten the room. A fan, a fridge or a television gives the detector something else to lock onto.
Is anything recorded?
No. The microphone stream is analysed in the page frame by frame and discarded — nothing is written to disk, buffered for later, or transmitted. The browser will not grant a page microphone access without your explicit permission, that permission is scoped to this site and revocable from the padlock icon, and closing the tab ends the access immediately.