Chromatic For Linux

Usually, most musical instruments require a bit of fine-tuning from time to time to ensure that they're playing correctly and are on key. In today's world, there are a lot of resources online, and also a lot of instrument tuning apps (both free and paid, both for desktops and mobile devices).

Chromatic is one such tool, a simple, free, and open-source, Linux-only application that allows you to fine-tune your instruments.

THe way it works is quite straightforward: it detects the frequency of the audio input, converts it to a musical note (of course, with the correct semitone and octave) and displays the errors using the cent.

What is a monetary unit for some, a cent for musicians is a unit of measure for the ratio between two frequencies. For example, an octave (two notes that have a frequency ratio of 2:1 and spans twelve semitones which translates to 1200 cents). Another example is the interval between two adjacent piano keys, which spans 100 cents.

To recap, the application displays the cents error via an analogue gauge. This should, at least, in theory, make the whole tuning process smoother and quite intuitive.

Apart from the Preferences section that allows you to manually enable or disable the gauge display, as well as select an input device, even though the app will try to automatically detect running inputs, yes, that's all.

Chromatic is no professional tool for fine-tuning instruments, but if you're using Linux, and you want a free app of the sort then, by all means, give it a try. Oh, just note that the app requires the presence of either one of the the most popular audio frameworks for Linux, PulseAudio or Pipewire.