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Silverlight 4 Guitar Tuner
One of the cool new features of Silverlight 4 is raw access to the camera and microphone. This opens up a whole bunch of cool possibilities for software development. One of them which we explored was creating an online guitar tuner.
Microsoft unveiled a beta version of Silverlight 4 at PDC, you can grab it here if you don’t have it installed
I remember looking for something like this a few years ago when I couldn’t find my real guitar tuner. All I found were a bunch of tools which simply played back the right pitch, they would not analyze the actual recorded pitch from your guitar, which is what I was used to using. I found some shareware tools that would do this but I really wanted something quick that I could just browse to and tune my guitar, and not risk downloading some viruses or waste time installing something only to realize it doesn’t do exactly what I wanted.
With Silverlight 4, we can now do this. We simply calculate the spectogram of the frequencies comprising a short period of time (currently half a second) to find the fundamental frequency of the sampled sound.
My favorite tuner lately has been the one on my POD XT Pro, so we designed this to look like that.
To speed things up, we used a good FFT implementation found on CodeProject and simply adapted it to work with Silverlight.
We also added a little bit of silence detection which helps the Tuner show when there’s no input, ideally you’d have some settings for this and some more input feedback with something like a volume meter. This is disabled in the demo above, you can enable it at compile time. Grab the source here, and feel free to implement these things yourself!
Archetype’s Silverlight 4 Applications Showcased in PDC Keynote
As part of the keynote presentation at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s Corporate VP, .NET Developer Platform, showcased two of Archetype’s innovative Silverlight 4 applications . Taking advantage of Silverlight 4’s new webcam and audio capabilities, Archetype created photobooth and barcode applications. The photobooth application allows users to record and playback video and still images via webcam, as well as apply a series of pixel shader effects, including bulge, chromakey, cartoon and emboss. The photobooth application also includes publishing capabilities, allowing users to share video and images via sites like Twitter and Facebook. During the photobooth application presentation, Scott captured a picture of himself with the bulge effect activated and published it to his Twitter account, making for an interesting profile picture.
Scott demonstrated the barcode scanning application by holding up in front of the webcam the barcode of a book he coauthored. After scanning and recognizing the barcode, the application then searched for the book and brought back a list of online retailers who carry the book, along with a picture of the book, prices and other details. Dramatically speeding up the purchasing process, the barcode application has myriad uses including finding products of all types.
Both of these demonstrations highlighted new, powerful capabilities in Silverlight, as well as Archetype’s commitment to being at the forefront of emerging technology. Through partnering with the Silverlight team, Archetype produced a set of compelling and useful applications that demonstrate the power of Silverlight 4 and its webcam support.
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