Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com
github.com
github.com
There's no path for OSS in this domain unfortunately because tabs are often licensed and owned by the publishing companies (or the artists at the very least). Oliver Tree is one dingbat who had most of his tabs taken down at one point despite being a total of 4 chords per song.
I'm pretty unhappy with the state of the space considering anyone can listen to a song and write a tab out.
I expect they're just gonna keep going till we're barely happy with it, or a little under that.
Has anyone attempted to make a fair use for education argument about this? Tabs aren't so much an actual creative work as instructions for how best to play a work. Because there's no timing information it's often impossible to reconstruct the actual music just from them.
Chords have even less information, a guitar chord transcription may have no resemblance to the notes actually played in a recording.
It's not just that the transcription is a (transformed) reproduction of the original piece. The record companies have the (exclusive) right to (sell) the transcriptions, sheet music, etc. of music they hold the rights to. They have that right, regardless of if they are actively or ever going to actually publish any.
I would guess a fair use defence would be feasible in the right case, but I'm not sure if that was ever tested in court. Most of the operators of tab websites were just people, they didn't stand a chance. If I remember correctly, Ultimate Guitar was/is one of the few sites that was big enough to negotiate with the MPA.
What was beautiful about the internet then was there were so many corners were monetization either wasn’t easy or wasn’t chased so things could just exist.
Not so anymore!
As long as they maintain that pace, I'm fine with some changes.
I guess the upside to UG is that it encouraged me to learn by ear.
1. This is really excellent. I looked up some tab that I had added to the site, and it does a great job presenting it. Most importantly, it does it in a very printable format.
2. If you a classical guitarist, or interested in classical guitar, you should check out https://www.classtab.org/ which is a gem of the internet.
WRT the sibling comment, and your "click for the repo" comment, unless we're now honoring the "license":"ISC" in package.json as formally legal, there is no license in your repo
The app straight up doesn’t work: playlists don’t actually load the next song when you expect, it takes way too long to load a sheet, and then you have to navigate to “chords” on each song in the playlist, which introduces MORE loading. They could save so much time by not loading shit I straight up don’t need. Oh, and you can’t manually sync songs for offline use, that’s the cherry on top, you are at the whim of their syncing schedule after you favorite a song.
Their UI sucks. I resorted to hoarding the .gpX files locally and using TuxGuitar. But TuxGuitar sucks too...
Regardless, thanks for doing this. This space could use some disruption. I don't want to support a site that used to be a simple search engine and mutated into a commercial walled-garden that exploits the creative works of thousands of people who originally did it for free. (oh wait...)
also, i just learned elsewhere on the thread that musescore is FOSS and loads all formats of guitar pro files!
See: https://github.com/kmille/freetar/blob/main/freetar/ug.py
Also Chordie works for me too
I notice that searching by artist can be inconsistent; for example, if I want the song "Sinners Defeat" by Mors Principium Est, I can find it if I search by title[1] but it doesn't appear in results by artist[2], while on UG I get that song plus a few more[3] (text tab only).
Very handy--the search is fast and looks like a search ought to look. Nice work!
1. https://freetar.androidloves.me/search?search_term=sinners+d...
2. https://freetar.androidloves.me/search?search_term=mors+prin...
3. https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/search.php?title=mors+princi...
Tabs plus sheet music, synced with original source recordings, with the web's best learning/practice features.
Example: https://www.soundslice.com/slices/txqfc/
It's a "BYOM" (bring your own music) situation as opposed to a library like Ultimate Guitar. But it's reasonably easy to import stuff. You can import a Guitar Pro file from Ultimate Guitar, Songsterr or wherever — our MusicXML and GP importers are excellent, seasoned by nearly a decade's worth of development and edge cases.
We've also recently launched a PDF/photo scanner, using machine learning to extract the musical semantics (in case you have some music on paper or in PDF). https://www.soundslice.com/sheet-music-scanner/
We've also got a full-featured notation/tab editor, and lots of musicians use it for transcribing source recordings. https://www.soundslice.com/transcribe/
Also relevant: we've never had ads, we've never taken funding and we've been profitable for years. Sustainable, product-driven and musician-first.
If you don't want to create an account, you can browse the public stuff that's been posted: https://www.soundslice.com/community/
We don't do any Instagram-like "Please register to continue viewing this" nonsense.
Just avoid Chrome, since Google’s business model is all about you seeing the autoplay and full screen ads from UG.
These days I’m a fan of Songsterr. Even handed them my credit card - I love that you can play along with the actual tracks, backing tracks (YouTube) or midi. I find myself learning more songs than the UG way.
Their app is even more annoying.
I added it to my Awesome Privacy Front-ends[1] list, hope that's okay!
[1] https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/awesome-privacy-front-ends
While I personally don't mind the default Wikipedia website and actually prefer it, I can see why some people would want something more "modern".
[1] Which I dislike, but I digress.
I am sure I am going to try Freetar.
One question - is pagination broken or not implemented? eg. searching for a band with a large discography like Built to Spill / Okkervil River only returns a small selection of tabs. It actually doesn't seem to be the first page even, more of a random selection.
Lots of competing ideas and implementations are being thrown around, though probably not as bad as when javascript went through the same process. There is definitely a large benefit to seeing how things like rust have handled this space.
Anyway, poetry is part of this explosion, but is one of the relatively better known and widely distributed options, so much so that for anyone on-the-inside it probably seems obvious.
If you were to gain attention hosting their scale of tabs, you would likely run into legal hurdles pretty quickly.
For example a full archive of most sites dating back to the 90s already exists here: https://tabarchive.mikethetech.com/index.php. However he does not have permission to actually share it.
There must be some variation of Zawinski's Law that explains the flaming dumpster that apps/sites like UG turn into. I feel like MuseScore is going in that direction too.
I was hoping by now we would have solved the problem of a decentralized repository of user-generated content without need for monetization.
IMSLP is monetized but far from terrible. The problem with sites like UG and MS is that they're essentially hosting bootleg content, which is only okay for as long as you can fly under the radar. IMSLP is the wholly above-board approach.
[0]: https://github.com/Pilfer/ultimate-guitar-scraper/pull/2
Please don’t think that UG is paying anybody to transcribe (or repair/moderate, desperately needed) the guitar tabs.
Transposing chords doesn't seem to be implemented (or should the plus/minus buttons do that)?
FWIW, I have really enjoyed seeing what old artists have put out post-COVID. Seems like a big creativity boost. For example, I really hadn’t checked in on Joe Satriani in years. Nothing in his work had stood out to me in a long time. His 2022 “Elephants of Mars” though is just excellent. The opening track has a guitar entry at about two minutes in that you can’t help but scrunch your face and bang your head to.
I honestly don't understand why it ended up like that. Did they really have that much trouble monetizing the largest collection of community-made content for guitar playing? Did YouTube eat their lunch in that regard? I imagine they had editorial staff for the articles (going off my 12+ year out of date memory), was that what was costing them so much? I really have no clue.
check out Plini and Intervals, some of my favorites in the same vein as Satriani.
also, I've found guitar pro to really be worth it. Sheet Happens publishes official tabs, and all their PDF tab books come with guitar pro files as well and theyre pretty good quality. Sheet Happens has a permanent guitar pro discount code too.
Or for a more robust piece of software (especially if you do tabbing/composing yourself or you want to generate/edit a tab from a MIDI file), MuseScore is also FOSS and can import GuitarPro files no problem. With its recent UI overhauls it's really become top-notch IMO.
But also the fact it is pinned to a spot on the viewport and always moving out of the corner of my eye.
They've had their fair share of controversy beyond just dark-patterns on UG. From adding telemetry into Audacity[0], causing a bunch of drama and multiple forks of Audacity, To (most notably, in my opinion) having their director of strategy, Daniel Ray, publicly threaten to report/have the Chinese government whisk away the developer of a Github repo for a MuseScore sheet music downloader[1]