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Tunepal app for iPhone and iPad


4.2 ( 9952 ratings )
Reference Music
Developer: Bryan Duggan
0.99 USD
Current version: 2.6, last update: 7 years ago
First release : 25 Feb 2010
App size: 10.86 Mb

Listed in the top 500 apps of all times by the Sunday Times (6 February 2012)

Listed in the top twenty cultural apps for iPhone by the Sunday Times (28 March 2010).

Winner of the best overall invention 2010 in the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Tunepal was in the top 25 grossing apps on the app store (17-18 July 2010).

The essential tool for all musicians playing traditional Irish, Scots, Welsh and Breton music!

Ever sat in a trad session and wondered what was the name of that great tune someone just played? Well now you can search a database of over 22,000 tunes from your iPhone/iPod BY PLAYING!

Hold your device up to a melody instrument such as the tin-whistle, flute, concertina, uilleann pipes, accordion or banjo, hit record and the melody will be extracted and submitted to the tunepal.org search engine for matching.

Matching tunes are downloaded to your device, where you can view and edit the notation or the stave, email the tune, post it to facebook or play it back using the high quality playback engine based on ABC2MIDI and FMOD.

Pros and cons of Tunepal app for iPhone and iPad

Tunepal app good for

This tool is wonderful and I give a big applause to Bryan Duggan. It works very good and very easy to use. BRAVO !
Very useful tool, if you have a relatively decent internet connection and not too much background noise it works a treat. Have tried it out both with the flute and in sessions and got a hit in most cases. Really like it!
If you ever play at Irish sessions, you owe it to yourself to buy this app. It links into a number of online music databases and you can bring up a tune by title as long as you have an Internet connection. Thats not where the magic is, however. If you are at a session and hear something new, you can have it sample 10 seconds of it at any point during the melody and Tunepal will tell you what it is, bringing up sheet music if you so desire. (It will even keep track of which pub you heard what in by recording GPS fixes.) So how accurate is the tune identification? It is dead on almost every time, regardless of the instruments, the noise level in the pub, etc. When its guessing the tune, it puts up a list of candidates ordered from most to least likely, along with a percentage certainty. Tunepal is actually rather modest most of the time. It may say its only 60% sure the top choice is right, but in my experience, its nearly always right anyway. If you are the first to show up at a session with Tunepal in hand, it will generate a lot of conversation and people will invariably try to stump it, only to be amazed at just how hard it is to fool.
This app is now my favorite out of hundreds I currently own! As a whistle and button box player, it is now essential equipment! I cannot believe how polished and bloody perfect it is! It has already paid for itself...within the first ten minutes! I would buy an iPhone just for this app, and nothing else! Seriously...I cant stop talking about it...
I didnt really expect this to work very well but simply hoped that every once in a while it would be able to pick a tune name out of the air for me. Boy was I surprised! Even in a noisy bar, recording a scratchy fiddle playing a weird variation, it still worked! This is an exceptional app and well worth the $5.
This is the be-all and end-all app which should be downloaded by EVERY single person who has ever played or simply appreciated Irish trad music. I cannot express how incredible this app is! If you use the preferences menu correctly for the tune you are seeking, it is virtually flawless! It has picked up and identified countless tunes for me no matter how ornamented or varied it was played! Now that you can sort the My Tunes section, this app is priceless! 5 Stars without question!

Some bad moments

Very disappointed. It finds a lot of tunes as described BUT menu bars take up 2/3 of the screen. Score appears very small. Rotating ipad makes score slightly larger, but the menu bars get bigger as well. Definitely not worth the 5 dollar App Store prices. If you buy, youll need magnifier glasses to see the score.
I tested this app against an hours worth of traditional tunes recordings, with no background noise, from Bohola to Old Blind Dogs, Flook to Lunasa, The Chieftains to Cherish the Ladies, the Boys of the Lough to Capercaillie, Altan to Ossian, from Danu to Dordan to Donal Clancy and his kin... 84% of the time Tunepal guessed the tune was Johnny Cope, with 57% confidence..... When I played a rendition of Johnny Cope, by Planxty, Tunepal thought it was The Lonesome Boatman, with 52% confidence.....The only 100% confidence I have is that Tunepal has yet to get a tune correct. It gets two stars because I remain ever hopeful.....
Ive tried this app many times before deciding to give it a bad review. With almost all the tunes I tried it on it was incredibly inaccurate. The tune I was searching for almost never came up on the list of options. Plus the app itself only works about half of the time. Dont waste your money on this one.
It is crashing. Wont even open. We love Tunepal. Please fix this new release so it works.
Cant even get the thing to load... Wasted 5 bucks. Should have bought a latte.
I cant open the program, and have lost ALL of my saved tunes when trying to reinstall.