After forty years playing this music....

[an seanduine]

I'm shocked

...shocked to find that alleged criticism is going on in here!

You played it for her, and you can play it for me. . . .




Bob

[Steampacket]

Just read through this thread and I still think that Tunepal is a very useful app for the iPhone . I get tunes anyway I can, from musicians, recordings, dots, by ear, from youtube clips, TG4 Irish trad programs, and the tunepal app is just another aid that works for me.

I, like Jem, like to get the name of a tune if possible, and Tunepal has been a big help. I play the pipes and the flute, old fashioned organic, wind powered instruments, which fascinate me, but it's 2010, not 1910, and I'll gladly use my Mac and iPhone to get names and tunes if I don't have a Irish traditional musician standing by to query. Tunepal can be used discreetly and doesn't have to disrupt a session.
Keep on trucking and "the ragman draws circles up and down the block"

[Julia Delaney]

Humble pie: I had tried Tunepal a few times before and thought it an interesting gimmick. But yesterday I changed my mind about it.
My sister played a fairly obscure Kerry jig on the fiddle last week. I haven't tried it on the flute yet but on the fiddle it's challenging and interesting. I learned the first part easily enough but I wished I had the dots for the tricky second part. I went to tunepal.org to see if this gadget really did the job and would find the tune. I played the first few bars into the recording function. It worked very slowly and not very precisely. It registered a garbled transcription and played the tune back inaccurately. I fumbled around for about ten minutes or so, trying to make it work, becoming very frustrated. At that point I could not imagine anybody using, much less buying, this thing.
Then I noticed a line at the very bottom of the site that said Mac users: Use Safari. So I opened Safari (rather than Firefox) and voila! I got the name of the tune (“The One After It”) and the abc. I copied the abc, got the dots from a converter, and learned the tune. I found Tunepal very helpful in this instance and I can see myself using it in the future. Thank you Bryan!
I wouldn't think of buying an iPhone just for this function. But I can imagine that at the end of a set when you' re chatting away and trying to find a name for a tune, it would be magical to be given the elusive name. Although Tunepal isn't absolutely essential I do intend to use it in the future. It's bound to become an integral part of the Internet itself. It's a great tool but I don't need to have the Net with me when I go shopping or to a session. I suppose that, like most of us, I am on the curve from Luddite to Nerd.
So this is a hearty recommendation for Tunepal.org. And remember: Mac users: Use Safari!

[Denny]

and on the eighth page...

[skooter500]

Hey I thought I'd posted a reply on this thread, but it doesnt seem to be here Maybe it got deleted or maybe the jetlag is messing with me. (Im in China - heading home this weekend). Thanks for all the comments positive and negative about Tunepal. A few thoughts of my own on the subject:

I put an unreasonable amount of time programming Tunepal for the iPhone - maybe 200 hours in total so far. Not to mention the 5 years I spent doing a PhD to figure out how to it in the first place! But I love programming and learning new things anyway - as much as I enjoy playing the flute, but in a different way of course. I am lucky in the job I have (I’m a comp science lecturer in the DIT) that it fits in nicely with my job and in the place I work, spending hundreds of hours on creative projects is the norm. For many people doing a PhD is a hard slog, but actually it was a pleasure for me!

Tunepal for the iPhone is the most useful thing I have ever done. If you have an iPhone, you should get it because IMO, after your instrument it is the most useful musical thing you can own. Its like a GPS for music. Once you start using it, you will wonder how on earth you ever survived without it. How did people used to do this before Tunepal? Tunepal not only identifies tunes with uncanny accuracy, it will also remember the tunes you searched for so you can find them again. You can also search through over 13000 tunes from all the important collections by entering a part of the title and view the stave, play back the tune, transpose it, speed it up, slow it down etc etc. Its written by a musician for musicians.

Of course there is no substitute for hard slog when trying to learn an instrument. Better to sit down in a room by yourself so you don’t annoy anyone for a couple of years and then another few years playing along quietly in sessions. Of course Tunepal or any other iPhone app cannot make that any easier or shorten the time. But anyone who believes technology has no place in “traditional” music is quite frankly talking through their holes. Music is not some mystic ritual locked in the past. It is evolving and changing all the time. As is how we interact together and play together. 200 years ago, there were no flutes. 120 years ago, there were very no written manuscripts of the tunes we play commonly today. 100 years ago, there was very little ensemble playing of Irish music. 50 years ago there were no pub sessions. 40 years ago there were no bouzukis. 30 years ago there were no CD’s. 10 years ago there was no thesession.org, iPods or digital tuners! The point is that in 10 years time who knows what way we will be playing together. Technologies will always evolve. If you can imagine it, it will happen eventually so long as don’t blow ourselves up or overheat the planet.

If you still doubt the usefulness of Tunepal, I’d encourage you to just try it out – even borrow someone else iPhone to try it. Everyone who uses it is amazed. Even I find it magical and I wrote the bloody thing!

Technology. I love it.

BTW In case anyone thinks Im in this for the money, I have received just over €500 from Apple in Royalties so far. Not much return for 200 hours work. On the other hand, I will get a trip to the Utrecht in August to present a paper about Tunepal at a Music Information Retrieval conference

[uillmann]

Congratulations Skooter500! It is really quite an achievement. I have not tried it yet, and I don't have an iPhone, but if I did, I'm sure it would be quite a useful tool. Maybe I can use it on my Macbook or iMac. If so, I think I will get it. Thank you for inventing it!

This gizmo reminds me of a conversation I had with Jack Coen years ago. He said when he was first starting to play, some musicians would not play a special tune very often, and not more than one or two times through. They were protecting their material from being lifted by other players. Jack said the cassette recorder put an end to that forever, and while it wasn't necessarily good for some particular musician, it helped the music overall.

[Denny]

BTW In case anyone thinks Im in this for the money

yer damn lucky to have come along when the technology was advanced enough to support the calculations and the Internet had the data to support the search.

Me hat's off to ya! Software than can pull things out of that hat is brilliant.

[plunk111]

I was wondering who put up one of the roadblocks to my PhD!!! I was going to do something similar (content addressable database) and found out it had already been done I just wish I could use your app - I don't have an iPhone, just an iPod Touch (1st generation)...

Pat

[uillmann]

I don't have an iPhone

I'd imagine there are quite a few of us who would like to have a tunepal but don't have an iPhone, (or, like me, don't want to spend so much on a monthly phone bill.) Could this thing be made as a stand alone device or combo digital tuner, $89 bucks and about the size of a matchbook?

[LorenzoFlute]

I'd imagine there are quite a few of us who would like to have a tunepal but don't have an iPhone, (or, like me, don't want to spend so much on a monthly phone bill.) Could this thing be made as a stand alone device or combo digital tuner, $89 bucks and about the size of a matchbook?

That would be great. And even better with a proper record function, and maybe also as an mp3 player

[Julia Delaney]

I'm going to wait for the implant.

[uillmann]

I'm going to wait for the implant.

[jemtheflute]

I'm going to wait for the implant.

Sounds like a no-brainer to me!

[eskin]

Everything you've described can be done on an iPod Touch with an external microphone (just use an iPhone headset), including high quality recording using iProRecorder and other apps as well as running TunePal. For TunePal, you'll have to be on a WiFi network. I guess we're lucky, there is open WiFi in both the pubs where we have sessions here in San Diego, but that would be a barrier for use in the field for many.

[LorenzoFlute]

I'm doing my best to avoid buying Apple products, don't like the way they're trying to force people to get their (over-expensive) stuff...