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Comment by rodw | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. I'm familiar with CustomsForge, and there are a lot of interesting things about it.

But you don't need anything nearly as complicated as Rocksmith files or CustomsForge to import songs into FATpick. FATpick already accepts Guitar Pro files, so there are thousands, maybe 10s of thousands of scores you can download from ultimate-guitar and other sites to import into FATpick.

Also, while obviously not as convenient, free software like TuxGuitar can convert other formats (MuseScore, MusicXML, etc.) into GuitarPro, so you can import pretty much any machine-readable score into FATpick (modulo proprietary formats like Rocksmith/CustomsForge, but you need to jump thru hoops to "extract" data in that format in the first place).

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> FATpick already accepts Guitar Pro files

This is interesting. I suggest you add that somewhere in the home page.

Well, technically I do mention it on both the landing page and the download page (and usually where-ever the functionality is described), but I guess the lesson here is that it needs to be called out more aggressively. I appreciate the feedback.

I agree with this. I didn't see any mention of this either.

Thanks.

I don't always reference "Guitar Pro" by name. Do you think that specific phrase would catch your eye or be more significant for you?

I.e. is "import Guitar Pro tabs" substantially more meaningful to you than, say, "import custom tabs"?

Absolutely. In fact make sure to mention which Guitar Oro formats as they've got so many and it's irritating to have to keep track of them all.

That's fair.

Full disclosure: right now FATpick will import gp3, gp4 and gp5 files. The "import song" button both enforces and mentions this, as does the user manual IIRC, but it's not something that's called out in any way.

If you have a gpx file (produced by Guitar Pro 6 or 7) then you'll need to convert it to gp5 to import into FATpick, at least for now. If you're using the GuitarPro app itself you can just save it that way. If you don't have the GuitarPro app TuxGuitar is free and handles this well (it works for editing GuitarPro files too).

Obviously it would be better to support .gpx directly, and for that matter things like MusicXML, too. But the GuitarPro format has to be more or less reverse-engineered, and gpx is unlike gp3, gp4 and gp5. Most files in the wild seem to be gp5 (or after that, gp3) anyway so that's where its at right now.

It seems like one could probably use some headless form of TuxGuitar on the back-end to convert gpx to gp5, but other than a cursory scan to see if that's a feature they already provide (it isn't) I haven't dug into it much more deeply than that.

Not the original poster, but absolutely. "Import custom tabs" is pretty vague in my eyes, and reading it just makes me think that the tool simply has a way to work with your own custom tabs. Just from reading it, I would've never guessed that it supports Guitar Pro tab import.

There's a library that makes it pretty easy to get the .xml format guitar tracks out of Rocksmith -> https://github.com/sandiz/psarcjs#usage

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