LINGOT - A musical instrument tuner

LINGOT is a musical instrument tuner. It’s accurate, easy to use, and highly configurable. Originally conceived to tune electric guitars, it can be used to tune other instruments.

It looks like an analogue tuner, with a gauge or strobe disc indicating the relative shift to a certain note, determined automatically as the closest note to the estimated frequency.

Main features

• It is free software, distributed under the GPL license.
• Quick and accurate, perfect for real-time microtonal tuning.
• Easy to use. Just plug in your instrument and run it.
• LINGOT is a universal tuner. It can tune many musical instruments, you only need to provide the scale temperaments. For that purpose, it supports the .scl format from the Scala project.
• Configurable via GUI. It is possible to change any parameter while the program is running, without editing any file.

Requirements

• A modest computer running GNU/Linux.
• A sound card with line-in or microphone input.
• Jack, ALSA, OSS or PulseAudio support.
• GTK+ library, version 3.10 or above.

Installation

If you are building a release, just type:

./configure
make install

If you are building a development version obtained from our VCS you will first need to create the configure script, by calling:

./bootstrap

The supported audio systems (alsa, oss, jack, pulseaudio) and the Fast Fourier Transform libfftw library can be enabled/disabled independently via options passed to the configure script. The following command displays all options and defaut value.

./configure --help

Below a summary of the packages needed to build a development version on Debian-based systems:

sudo apt-get install \
    intltool \
    libasound2-dev \
    libcunit1-dev \
    libfftw3-dev \
    libgtk-3-dev \
    libjack-jackd2-dev \
    libjson-c-dev \
    libpulse-dev \
    libtool \
    pkg-config

Beware that LINGOT ships an experimental shared library, whose interface could be subject to change. If you have trouble finding the library when launching the aplication, please consider reporting a bug, and try setting the library path to your installation location as a work-around:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib lingot

Synopsis

lingot [-c config]

The -c option causes the search of a file named {config}.conf in the ~/.config/lingot/ folder. For example:

lingot -c bass

will take the configuration file ~/.config/lingot/bass.conf. This is useful for maintaining different configurations for different instruments. It's also possible to load and save configuration files from the GUI. The default configuration file is ~/.config/lingot/lingot.conf.

Resources

• Official LINGOT website
• Project page in Savannah
• Downloads page in Savannah