My webapp: Guitar tabs as they should be | Hacker News Reader

My webapp: Guitar tabs as they should be

guitaryst.com

35 pointskilian32 comments

This is great, but as another comment below notes, beware the legal troubles that are headed your way. A number of wonderful guitar tab sites (starting with OLGA back in the day) have been taken down.

In fact, it seems that OLGA is still down: http://www.olga.net/ And they just put up tabs.

Yes, I know :( This kept me from doing anything in this direction for a long, long time, but in the end I just wanted to build something cool. I don't host any of the tabs so that might make a difference. However if people want to take me offline, I'm just going offline.

Your domain is already on a non-US registrar, so all you need to do is move from EC2 to a non-US host like abdicar.com, PRQ, admin.2x4.ru, or any "bullet-proof" host. They will ignore DMCA requests and their ilk.

Your website doesnt seem to work under Firefox 3.6.12 (windows 7 64bits) . I can see the page 1second and after I am redirect to a blank page and the page is stuck loading.

Strangely the site works smoothly with Chrome..

I'm sorry! This is a bug I just can't seem to fix (and it's not consistent either) or find out why it's happening.

If it behaves differently in FireFox and Chrome and it's inconsistent, it's usually an issue with the speed of JavaScript execution and the order of the JavaScript operations.

If it works in FireFox but not Chrome, it usually indicates a problem with the JavaScript executing too quickly. E.g. computing the width of one element and setting it based on the width of another element on the page, before the content of that other element has been fully rendered.

If it works in Chrome but not FireFox, it usually indicates a problem with the JavaScript executing too slowly. E.g. firing off an intensive process, like manipulating 100 elements on the page at once, and then firing off another action that depends on the previous process being completed. If the JavaScript execution is slow, it's possible to fire off the next event while the other is still being processed.

In this case you'll want to either have the previous function fire off an event when it's completed, and bind the next function to that event, or brute force it with a setTimeout.

Wow, that was way longer than I meant it to be. Oh well, hope it helps.

Thanks, seems I'll be bughunting tonight :)

FYI, I managed to track this down to the twitter 'hovercards' causing a fit onload. Got rid of them and the problem went away.

Very cool as a V1, with a user experience that's loads better than existing alternatives. Couple feature suggestions (that are probably already on your roadmap):

-User and/or editor reviews are a must. Tab quality tends to range from completely wrong to almost right, and without any kind of community input it can be difficult for newbies to tell the difference.

-I don't know how feasible it is, but a web based version of PowerTab (or comparable solutions) would be great. Old-school tabs are nice, but when you can listen to a MIDI-fied version of a portion of a tab, it helps a lot.

I have plans for getting much better tabs, but I'm not there yet.

Regarding number two, check out http://www.songsterr.com, I don't think I'm ready to compete with them yet :)

I wrote this much in the same vein as http://lystener.com, as just an easier, better and prettier way than other guitar tab sites. Let me know what you think! :)

Edit: For people wanting more info, I wrote a blog post too: http://kilianvalkhof.com/2010/css-xhtml/guitar-tabs-as-they-... It has invites to the hosting platform I use: http://djangy.com, a very cool "Heroku for Django"

Looks great, but do you have any agreements in place to keep your site up where others have been shutdown?

Definitely don't want an invite for this host. The site has been unreachable since the link made it to the font page of HN.

I don't think so: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/guitaryst.com There's about 90 people online right now :)

I find the tablature somewhat difficult to read. The color of the text doesn't contrast too well against the background. You might also try to find a typeface but I assume you need something monospaced for this app.

Otherwise this looks really awesome!

This is really nice, I was thinking of working on something similar for a web-based music player I'm building. Just curious, is your tab data from one source, or a variety of sources? Or is that confidential? :)

Keep up the good work

Feel free to email me! My email is at the bottom of the site or in my profile here :)

You need a demo button so I can see how it works without creating an account.

type username "test" in Last.fm box

Or search for a song.

Hover over "last.fm". Next to Last.fm I support Like.fm and Libre.fm, and regular tab search :)

Consider putting a down arrow next to "last.fm" to show that it's a dropdown option. I had no idea until I read this comment.

At first I didn't notice that you could search for songs. It didn't work for me in Chrome or Opera (didn't bother trying other browsers after that); no music was playing at all. Nice idea though.

i couldn't get this to work. i put "test" in for the last.fm name like was suggested here. a song and tab appeared, and nothing else. am i missing audio or something?

when i browse tab sites, i know which ones have the quality tabs. i choose ultimate-guitar and bassmasta as frequently as possible because i know i hate 911tabs, etc. i'm not going to switch to anyone's new web app unless i know they have the best tabs from these other sources.

This is awesome. Hope you can get around the legal stuff. I wish I still had a guitar because I'd definitely be all over this.

This is really cool. Hope you can deal with the legal issues, because I would use this for sure.

FYI - The page has been stuck loading for me for several minutes.

The Twitter button is being mega slow, just press stop and the page should load :) I'll look into getting loading those after the rest of the page is done!

You should just look into using AddThis, which allows you to load their script async and it'll load itself once the DOM is ready:

https://www.addthis.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12202

you can do the twitter button async as well http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/08/13/the-twitter-but...

Nice find, but I find it kind of ironic that the page took about 10 seconds to finish loading from the other non-async scripts the author has on that page :)

Cheers, implemented this right away!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com