This is pretty nice, and there's already a lot of tools out there. I've built some of my own tools to scrape their tabs and store all my own stuff since I expect they will continue locking tabs down more like they already have. I'm a lifetime UG pro member but they keep pushing the envelope too far to monetize more.
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 suspect it would take a long while for an open source project to run into this limitation, especially if the tabs were distributed soulseek-style.
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.
The transcriptions (created by people) are always going to be seen as derivative works, unfortunately. It doesn't matter how closely it matches the recorded performance. But the fact that text-based tabs remained online (at least more so than transcriptions, powertabs, etc.) is likely because of the lower fidelity.
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.
Dang, that’s a bummer to hear about Oliver Tree. Love his schtick, never realized he was taking the music so seriously. I always assumed it was intentionally simple to the point of mockery.
There are spaces where free copies of licensed content are widespread. Of course, I don't know anything about them, but I'm sure they provide a valuable force against capitalism.
I've gone to ultimate-guitar since the early 2000s. Some of my tabs are still on there. Visiting it today is a god-damn tragedy. What a mess of a site. I'll definitely be trying this.
The only things from that era that didn’t get outright worse stayed the same (Craigslist).
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.
Sites need to monetize because how else will they pay for Amazon ElasticLambda to serve their users’ click X-Y coordinates to T5 FireAnt, their distributed backend, on a planetary scale?
Same. I made many online friends on the forum and it used to be my e-hangout in the early to mid 00s. I fondly remember the IRC channel we used to hang out in. I think I have a tab or two published on the site as well. Every time I pop back in for a visit these past few years it always pushes me back away.
Oh hallelujah, I've got a lifetime sub due to buying their app back in the day and was grandfathered in, so I can escape some of the marketing, but their crazy, pants-on-head UI makes guitar harder a lot of the time.
I remember OLGA, the On-Line Guitar Archive. In the 1990’s when I was learning to play guitar in my teens, OLGA hosted enough user-generated text-based tabs for me to learn every song I’d ever heard/wanted to play, for free.
This is absolutely awesome. I've been learning guitar since ~15 months now and I strongly dislike the ads and popups in all (most?) of the guitar sites, and this is a perfect simple interface that does the job and doesn't waste time. Great idea and great execution.
PS @kmille I was missing sorting the table, so I took some code off of SO and made a pull request. It isn't using jQuery so it might break some code conventions you have, but I'll be glad to have the sorting feature if you can merge and deploy the new code! Again thanks for ideating and making this.
This is great. The original has become pretty hostile to users over the years, which is especially unacceptable since users have contributed most of the content that defines the site.
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
Readit News
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.
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.
I expect they're just gonna keep going till we're barely happy with it, or a little under that.
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!
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