calculating frequency with apple's auriotouch

Question

I am working on a program that needs to capture the frequency of sound from a guitar. I have modified the aurioTouch example to output the frequency by using the frequency with the highest magnitude. It works ok for high notes but is very inaccurate on the lower strings. I believe it is due to overtones. I researched ways on how to solve this problem such as Cepstrum Analysis but I am lost on how to implement this within the example code as it is unclear and hard to follow without comments. any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

As you have discovered, musical pitch is not the same as peak frequency.

But trying to investigate algorithms while trying to work with real-time audio is not easy.

I suggest you separate the problems. Record some music sounds (guitar plucks, etc.) on your Mac into raw sound files. Try your chosen pitch estimation algorithms on these recorded sample sets. Then, after you get this working, figure out how to integrate your code into the iOS audio and Accelerate (for FFT) frameworks.