Show HN: Soundslice – YouTube + synced guitar tabs + HTML5
soundslice.com
soundslice.com
That being said, your "demos" on the home page are incredibly awesomely impressive. And..... way way way beyond where I will ever find the time to get to.
And when I clicked the "Play with an example" link I literally LOL'd!!!
I may have no idea who your target audience is, but from this example.... it's not me :/
If you wanted to inspire someone like me to run upstairs, grab my guitar, and come back to your site to try it out really quick - and probably get hooked, I would consider making one of your demos pretty dumb-simple, if you know what I mean. Something fun or well known, not copyrighted of course, but something I could accomplish right now with my guitar.
But maybe I'm not your customer, I don't know.
If I am, maybe consider 2 buttons: Beginner Example and Advanced Example.
Good luck, this looks awesome.
For me, this was amazing because it distilled how something as hard as the example is played and can be learned.
The site is beautiful, and I'll use it, and even try to add a couple of tabs. This needs to live on people! :)
Though as a musician who reads off of sheet music -- is there a way to un-Guitar-Hero-ify the scrolling tabs thing? Maybe my video card is too slow or something, but following the notes is really tiring on my eyes, in addition to dealing with low refresh rate of the visuals.
Edit: d'oh, just noticed the settings to page instead. Would be nice to have more measures before it pages though (again, stone age sheet reader here -- as a musician I probably cache 1-4 measures ahead of what I need to play, when sight reading).
Edit 2: Aha, found the features once I logged in; spoke too soon. :) I think if you make the benefits of creating an account and signing in apparent you'd get even better signup... I guess I'm just missing things all over the place but it definitely would have gotten me to sign up sooner when I realized I could unlock more features.
(Edit) You might also try zooming out a wee bit so that the notes don't go by as quickly. That's helped me a lot as I've used it.
Only issue for me is that even in 1/2 speed its moving to fast for my eyes to focus on the numbers. So what I need is to have the lines separated like musical notation so that I can look down and read ahead and see the next line coming, without the numbers moving, so my eyes can focus.
Pretty much everyone that reads music/tabs reads ahead of where they are actually playing its probably something you do subconsciously without realizing it but being unable to do so makes reading tabs much harder.
Other then that this is really really cool!
It's hard to focus on a moving target and "Paged" feels more natural to me since that is how sheet music works. It allows you to look ahead without worrying about the upcoming notes moving.
Since an individual can only play one part at a time, rather than showing two scrolling parts, two pages of the same part should be shown. Initially, page 1 can be shown above page 2. The playhead is the only thing that moves, from the left of the screen to the right. Initially it moves across page 1. When it reaches the right side of the screen, it moves to the start of page 2, below and to the left. At that time, page 1 is replaced with page 3. This way the pages remain still, while allowing the user to progress through the song.
edit: I am curious about one thing -- how do you plan on handling copyright down the road?
2nd edit: Feature request, if you hover over chords, it'd be cool if it showed the finger placement
The transcription/tab output itself can not be copyright - sweat of the brow.
There is the question of whether a useful user resource can be maintained if/when the host video is taken down - can the tab stand alone without the original audio?
I think so - reduced utility, of course, but legally on solid ground and still better than tabs alone.
The original composer owns the copyright on the arrangement itself. Your imperfect transcription is a separate derivative work but is still subject to the copyright of the original.
So the question remains: how do you plan on dealing with the copyright issues?
But if you can survive the copyright issues, the site itself is impressive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablature#Legal_issues
> The MPA had been pushing for websites offering free tablatures to be shut down. MPA president Lauren Keiser said that their goal is for owners of free tablature services to face fines and even imprisonment.
http://www.out-law.com/page-7235, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/29/guitar_sites_under_f... give details of take downs, a few years ago, around the provision of guitar tabs. Note that the MPA moved the next year to make specific provision for licensing of guitar tabs, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/04/legal-guitar-tabs....
I suspect Capo, http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/Capo/, operates the way it appears to because they can circumvent many things (that copyright in the music or production of the tracks would restrict) by using the users purchased tracks as the source for the information.
Soundslice looks awesome but if they've not yet consulted with copyright experts then I fear they may be looking at a lawsuit imminently.
Choosing Yesterday [which is beautifully played] as one of the example tracks was pretty ballsy. FWIW the YouTube video links to Bandcamp where an album of covers are available - Bandcamp are obviously aware of this sort of issue, they can't sell unlicensed covers lawfully. Bandcamp T&C (http://bandcamp.com/faq#mixtape) specifically rule out the use of their service for covers. $0.091 is the current fee per digital play of the track (audio only), sync fees can be more or less; see eg Limelight or HFA or BMI.
http://diymusician.cdbaby.com/2012/03/on-posting-cover-songs... covers the licensing requirements quite well.
but as far as html5 tools for guitar tabs goes, this is certainly a huge step forward.
http://www.soundslice.com/yt/Y6ti5f-LHp4/
It's tough for me to follow the tab while it's scrolling rapidly by... so I'd like to see a big A7 / B / etc. on the top right corner of the screen, so I can follow along with my guitar.
As for the rapid scrolling, I usually zoom out on the timeline which causes the playhead to move slower.
Do you plan on adding functionality to help people create SoundSlices? I'll just list the features I put in the concept maybe you will find some useful.
* Ability to slow down the track to let the musician hear the notes more easily while transcribing. * Import existing ASCII tabs and input a BPM to create a base annotation that the user can then tweak. -2-4-7- gets imported differently than -247-. Does this by stretching the tab to fit the time of the song. This was very useful. * Attempted to do pitch detection and bpm detection... didn't work so well maybe tech has changed. * Show guitar fingerings. * Allow the user to "highlight" a portion of the song so that it will loop only that portion. This is useful for both annotating and learning. E.g. highlight the solo and slow it down to "hear" the notes better while annotating while looping it, or slowing it down to practice it repeatedly. * Use arbitrary formats as input (spotify, pandora, mp3 file, etc.)
Please kill GuitarPro and ASCII tabs for me :)
I hope it doesn't come into the cross hairs of sheet music / copyright industry the way most of the tabs and lyrics sites seem to have.
This seems like an intuitive and logical approach to learning both how to play particular songs, as well as improving tempo comprehension. Well done, I'm quite impressed with my Soundslice experience thus far!
Any plans to add lyrics to the annotations? It would be cool to be able to follow other contributors as well because some people are great at tabbing things out and others are terrible. Some sort of star rating on the quality of the tab (similar to UltimateGuitar) would be nice as well.
Also, small usability suggestion - I signed up and went looking for a way to start making annotations, but couldn't find it. It took me a while to realize I had to verify my email address before I could use the full capabilities of the site. It may be worth calling that out earlier on (or even skipping the email verification if you can).
The site doesn't require email verification to start using it... What was it you couldn't find -- the "Add track" plus button?
This is really remarkable stuff, and I hope to see more in the future!
Also, if you could please get back tor recording a little ditty here or there for public enjoyment, it'd be much appreciated :)
And, yes, I need to get back on a regular YouTube posting schedule... :-)
In Yesterday [1], shouldn't the song structure appear at the bottom instead of at the top? The layers correspond to decreasing levels of granularity, and I cannot thing of any good reason why they should not be in that order.
Thanks for the awesome tool.
Possible bug report: I couldn't figure out how to exit looping mode, and had to refresh the page.
Not sure if you can fix this: two-fingered left scrolling in the tab area activates my browser's "back" function.
To exit looping mode, just press Pause? Or were you just trying to clear a selection? (If the latter, just click anywhere in the timeline canvas.)
I have searched high and low for a fix to that two-fingered left scrolling in Chrome, and there doesn't appear to be a way to fix it. :-( If anybody knows, please tell me!
1) put the annotation inside a container (and make that position:relative); annotation position:absolute, right:0px; 2) autoscroll the container 3) add some JS to infinitely increase the width of the container on a left-ish mouse move. (I think this will still work even if the container is, itself, in a cropping container.
I suspect the result will be that 2-finger left swipe will be like quicksand - no apparent movement. Kind of sucks, but less than losing your page.
An alternative would be to make history back/forward suck less: keep the display state in local storage and render a page just as it was the last time a person saw it (in terms of time display, modes, and selections).
Probably that's a useful thing to do anyway and has Least Surprise in its side.
I'm sure someone else has already said it elsewhere in the comments, but I find myself wanting to share the different demos with people and I'm sure it would improve the viral coefficient. Toss some share buttons on there, perhaps?
In any case, I'm going to take this for a spin next time I sit down with my guitar. Nicely done!
How much does the lack of a share button prevent you from "manually" sending the link to friends via Twitter/Facebook by copying and pasting? (I'm asking honestly -- and I'd like to prevent the site from getting gunked up with share links.)
So, I might not think of sharing it without seeing a button, and if I do think of sharing something, but requires me to copy, go to Facebook, write a note, paste, go to Twitter and do the same thing, I'll just be like "oh, forget it." (unless I'm really excited... I shared the general link on Facebook, but not any individual song).
I would think of sharing as a feature, rather than clutter. Here's my user story - "As a user, I want to share this tasty jam with my bandmate so we can shred together" (decided to have fun with that one).
It may be going to far, but you might even want to make sharing a song a call to action ("Did you enjoy this song? Share it with friends!" [followed by big fat Facebook & Twitter buttons])
Rocksmith [1], which can be described as Guitar Hero for real guitars and basses, does a pretty nice job with the UI, difficulty levels and such. It would be cool to see a more open version of Rocksmith where you could load up tabs/songs on demand.
For reference, I wouldn't pay for Soundslice, but I have already shelled out $100+ on Rocksmith (Game, Bass expansion, songs, cords, guitars, etc) and am willing to shell out more (Ex: A Rush Pack just came out I believe.)
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=k...
My suggestion: the interface for entering the tabs is not ideal. You should invent a srt-like file format for entering chords. For instance a sing thats the same three chords over and over again is tedious to enter through your interface.
I usually don't see so much innovation in this market, but this is a very big step forward if compared to the printed tabs spread in my house.
Congrats and keep up the good work!
Have you seen vextab? http://vexflow.com/vextab/
It's a javascript library for displaying tablature and musical notation. It uses its own text format for describing tablature, but it is pretty easy to work with. I noticed that your tab doesn't have any slide/bend information, which vextab does. It may not be as necessary because the audio is well synchronized.
(It looks like the "latest by others" section is almost entirely incomplete ones)
(btw, awesome site)
[08:42:30,567] TypeError: this.yt_player.playVideo is not a function @ http://media.soundslice.com/scripts/soundslice.min-f58020e4a...
I'm surprised by how rarely people integrate a YouTube player into sites, does anyone have any other good examples?
The one thing I miss: if I search I don't get any video with already made soundslice tabs. Even a search on 'nirvana' returns no result with soundslice annotation even though there are some.
The guitar playing is amazing though and the application has a nice layout to it and good use of HTML5. Well done.
Does anyone know if this is remotely possible? I messed around briefly with this a while back, and I remember it being very difficult to get a note (much less a chord) from a noisy signal.
I can imagine software that would analyze fret noise, vibrato, timbre, hand positions, etc. to get a decent shot at reproducing a performance -- basically, what a real player listens for when transcribing -- but right, this is a really hard problem.
- Ability to loop sections of a song.
- An easy way to restart the current song from beginning.
- And, because I'm not great... Slower than half-speed playback.
Thanks for providing a great service!Two suggestions: Definitely make scroll speed a setting (similar to how Rockband 'difficulty' is just them spacing things out further to make it harder) and maybe a slower example? A slower example might be friendlier to new players / more welcoming?
Edit: Also, when I signed up and checked out all the tabs... I ended up getting 'Video not available'. Not sure if that's regional settings kicking in (i.e Canada gets nothing)...
MacBook Pro 2012, Chrome, 20/20 vision
Looks great!
I doubt anyone else is getting that, but you might get bug reports about it.
But great site overall!
Hope this takes off, really well done!
Top work!
Like others said, perhaps I should take my guitar out of its case and get my caluses back.
Using Chrome Version 23.0.1271.64 m @ Windows 8 btw.
Future feature: Lyrics with chords.
might be worth adding way to have the community mark a tab as complete. the couple i checked other than the tutorial ones weren't finished.. made the experience frustrating. i know its early and coverage will only improve, but that might help smooth out that process.
It will be interesting if you can share the implementation of this system in a blog post. :)
the last time i got excited about something like this there were rumors of HTML tags for various chords and tablature signs.
super excited to see this in development!
I love the Beatles and Yesterday is one of the few songs of theirs I just can't play. This app helped me finally get it.
Chrome 23, Win7 here.
Here's the JS error:
Uncaught TypeError: Object #<V> has no method 'playVideo' soundslice.min-f58020e4af284a830f36ea5da581a066.js:73BTW, I'm getting a console error in some few videos: Cannot read property 'player' of undefined
Is the console error happening consistently for certain videos, or is it sporadic?