[HN Gopher] Freetar - an alternative front end for ultimate-guit...
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Freetar - an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com
Author : kmille
Score : 337 points
Date : 2023-11-29 10:04 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| cfr2023 wrote:
| Needs more ads... jk... it's actually so good that I'm afraid it
| will be killed.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| cpursley wrote:
| Much needed, UG has become unusable.
|
| 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.
| rockbruno wrote:
| If you have Guitar Pro, you can download the gp files from
| Songsterr and open them directly in GP. I like this because I
| can then have the same features (apart from the Youtube bit)
| with all of GP's added goodies.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I love/hate Guitar Pro. It's indispensable but unstable.
| namanyayg wrote:
| 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.
| namanyayg wrote:
| 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.
| bartkappenburg wrote:
| I'm a fan of chordify[0], much recommended!
|
| [0] https://www.chordify.net
| kitd wrote:
| +1.
|
| Also Chordie works for me too
|
| https://www.chordie.com/
| nelsonfigueroa wrote:
| Ultimate Guitar has gotten worse over the years. I noticed
| they're featuring TikTok-like videos on their home page now which
| gave me a laugh. I switched to Songsterr a while back and it's
| amazing. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for tabs.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Something UG added a couple (?) of years ago was support for
| standard notation. Songster is strictly tabs. For me, that is a
| deal breaker.
| mksybr wrote:
| Have you tried TuxGuitar?
| adrianh wrote:
| Shameless self-promotion for my site Soundslice:
| https://www.soundslice.com/
|
| 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.
| Haul4ss wrote:
| I've seen this software used on a couple different video lesson
| platforms (I am currently subscribed to Open Studio). It works
| really well. Occasional browser funniness, but otherwise a
| really solid tool for learning music. Great work!
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| That thing requires registration.
| adrianh wrote:
| Hi Dudester230602! Yeah, if you want to create your own music
| in there, you'll need an account.
|
| 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.
| timo-e-aus-e wrote:
| Nice, love it.
| patwolf wrote:
| This is fantastic.
|
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I was hoping by now we would have solved the problem of a
| decentralized repository of user-generated content
|
| 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.
| amiga386 wrote:
| The popular word these days is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| vr46 wrote:
| 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.
| pknopf wrote:
| I did the same! I'm so happy I did!
| beowulfey wrote:
| 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.
| lhnz wrote:
| Yes, it's very sad to see work you provided for free to a
| community used to exploit these people.
| gspencley wrote:
| 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.
| marricks wrote:
| 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.
|
| Not so anymore!
| FredPret wrote:
| 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?
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| You have forgotten Bonzi Buddy.
| berniedurfee wrote:
| Craigslist needs to be added to the list of national
| historical sites and should _never ever_ be allowed to
| change.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| They've made small, thought out changes over the years that
| improved things. Small things like better gallery image
| handling and some filtering.
|
| As long as they maintain that pace, I'm fine with some
| changes.
| briankelly wrote:
| Rest in peace, mxtabs.
|
| I guess the upside to UG is that it encouraged me to learn by
| ear.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Love it. Thank you. Ultimate guitar is nothing just scamming
| bullshit.
| a1o wrote:
| I wonder if someone can use this to slowly download everything to
| have an offline archive - which then could be shared somewhere
| else.
| teabee89 wrote:
| I cannot thank you enough. This was so needed! I'm gonna use it,
| hoping it's not gonna get killed.
| jampekka wrote:
| Ooh, this is a godsend. UG is so full of dark patterns and nags
| it's almost unusable. It's a travesty and whoever runs such scam
| on community provided content should do some serious soul
| searching.
|
| Transposing chords doesn't seem to be implemented (or should the
| plus/minus buttons do that)?
| boringg wrote:
| Right? It was such a great resource for such a long time and
| then they just butchered it.
| scop wrote:
| I played a ton of guitar in high school and UG was my go-to
| resource for a lot of stuff. I then stopped for a long time
| due to career, marriage, kids, etc, only to pick up the ol'
| axe again this year. I dutifully opened up UG and was
| _shocked_ at how horrible it was. Ok fine, I'll download the
| damn app you dirty bastards. Oh, you mean I'm still accosted
| by all the dark patterns in the app too? I can only assume
| any PII given to them is sold quickly and efficiently.
|
| 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.
| lghh wrote:
| Literally the same experience as me. I had not been to UG
| since I started my career as a dev. I now have _thoughts
| and opinions_ about the internet. UG goes against basically
| every single one of them.
|
| 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.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| woah, me too! stopped during college and I decided to take
| guitar serious this time and get some lessons which i
| started in July. it's been a huge improvement and super
| fun.
|
| 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.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| FYI TuxGuitar is a FOSS player that can load/play/edit
| PowerTab and GuitarPro files. Multiplatform too. It's not
| completely 100% bug-free, but it's good enough to load
| and play most tabs flawlessly.
|
| 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.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| i didn't realize musescore opened guitar pro 7/8 files
| (which is what sheet happens publishes)! sadly tux guitar
| support stopped at gp5. I will definitely be checking out
| musescore, thanks for the rec!
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| For whatever reason, UG's omnipresent video of a guy supposedly
| playing the song of the currently viewed tab always grates me
| more than it should. Probably because it's always an acoustic
| regardless of song.
|
| But also the fact it is pinned to a spot on the viewport and
| always moving out of the corner of my eye.
| Andoryuuta wrote:
| UG is now owned by (Muse Group), which also owns MuseScore,
| Audacity, StaffPad, etc.
|
| 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]
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27727150
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27881539
| scaglio wrote:
| Just... Thank You! It's blazing fast, (even too) clean, and
| without that mess that UG became in the last decade.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Oh wow. This reminds me a lot of the OLGA.net (On Line Guitar
| Archive) back in the day before the Harry Fox Agency shut it
| down. Thanks for this.
| criddell wrote:
| What changed? Why aren't publishers going after current music
| sites?
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| Two things:
|
| 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.
| pastinaaak wrote:
| Also: https://www.delcamp.net/
| CustomRanch_ wrote:
| Thanks for building this! Bookmarked.
|
| 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...
| starstripe wrote:
| I will be using this for sure. How did you get all their data?
| API or did you scrape?
| KomoD wrote:
| Yeah, it's scraping.
|
| See: https://github.com/kmille/freetar/blob/main/freetar/ug.py
| symlinkk wrote:
| This is just stealing content.
| jquast wrote:
| All of the content is provided by the community, if not
| directly submitted, ripped from message boards, Usenet, and
| other websites.
|
| Please don't think that UG is paying anybody to transcribe (or
| repair/moderate, desperately needed) the guitar tabs.
| jonathrg wrote:
| I feel like this has to be breaking the terms of service for the
| site
| alkonaut wrote:
| It's community content and bandwidth can't be that big? can't
| someone mirror the backend too?
| meesles wrote:
| It's community content however due to UG's monetization they
| are subject to tablature licensing rules (hence why some
| artists can't be found on there).
|
| 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.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I hope you don't read this comment because that's breaking my
| terms of service.
| casperc wrote:
| Love the return to text based chords/tabs (without all the other
| crap on top). That is all that is needed really. This guitar/tab
| space is ripe for disruption if you ask me.
| MWParkerson wrote:
| I bought a year of pro and returned it 24 hours later at a loss
| (I had signed up using a non refundable promo code)
|
| 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.
| titzer wrote:
| I hate what ultimate guitar has become. Before it evolved into
| the current ad-laden, walled-garden rat trap that it is now, it
| basically was just a _search engine_ for tabs. What amazes me is
| that so many hobbyists made Guitar Pro tabs in their spare time
| and uploaded them for free to the internet. Then UG came along
| and indexed them. For a time, that was good. Now UG operates like
| it owns that content. It 's been so heavily SEO'd that you
| basically cannot search Google anymore without getting railroaded
| there. You need to search elsewhere.
|
| 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...)
| LesZedCB wrote:
| hint, check out the history/revisions button at the top right
| on songsterr
|
| also, i just learned elsewhere on the thread that musescore is
| FOSS and loads all formats of guitar pro files!
| meesles wrote:
| 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.
| doublemint2203 wrote:
| microeconomics man. the product is not optimized for you, it's
| a tool to scrape $ out of ya.
|
| I expect they're just gonna keep going till we're barely happy
| with it, or a little under that.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| doakes wrote:
| Artists and/or their publisher own all tabs made for their
| song? How does that work?
| duped wrote:
| They don't own the tabs, they own the rights to publish
| transcriptions of the music.
| rozab wrote:
| 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.
| nyjah wrote:
| 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.
| jamesponddotco wrote:
| This is awesome! So much cleaner and easier to navigate compared
| to to UG, it isn't even funny. So much easier to navigate and
| focus on what's important. Thanks for sharing!
|
| 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
| globular-toast wrote:
| Why does Wikipedia need one? The alternative project doesn't
| seem to explain this. (In fact, none of them do, but I can
| probably guess what's bad about most of them if I don't already
| know).
| jamesponddotco wrote:
| Among other things, it implements a whole new interface[1]
| that removes the "nagging" from Wikipedia. It also removes
| all tracking. The interface was a lot cleaner and was
| completely JavaScript-free until a few months ago, which is
| why I added it to the list.
|
| 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.
| ctenb wrote:
| I made a similar web app a few years ago. I think it competes
| quite well with this one. It has syntax highlighting :)
| https://tabviewer.app/
| certifiedloud wrote:
| Love it. Is it open source? The only thing missing imo is a
| chord viewer.
| ctenb wrote:
| Clicking the readme takes you to the repo
| mdaniel wrote:
| relevant: https://github.com/tablature-viewer/tablature-
| viewer.github....
|
| 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
| quickestpoint wrote:
| Sssh... peaceful. Thanks!
| ronyeh wrote:
| If you can't avoid mobile, use an alternative browser with built
| in blocking like Duck Duck Go or Firefox Focus or Brave. It works
| great for me, since my phone can rest easily on my digital piano
| sheet music stand.
|
| Just avoid Chrome, since Google's business model is all about you
| seeing the autoplay and full screen ads from UG.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I wrote a CLI for it:
| https://codeberg.org/ltworf/ultimateultimateguitar
| devin wrote:
| I wonder if you could also add a way to show open and movable
| fingerings for chords on hover?
| skrebbel wrote:
| Nitpick suggestion: Maybe link to Poetry for those of us not
| deeply in Python land? It was non-trivial for me to figure out
| that it's some sort of package manager for Python. It's also
| totally un-googleable so that didn't help :-)
| buildsjets wrote:
| This right here. I was interested right up until I got to "You
| need poetry.", at which point I closed the browser window. I
| have plenty to do without trying track down some rando
| developer's dependencies.
| thebiglebrewski wrote:
| Yesss awesome! UG's UI has just gotten progressively worse over
| the years. It's one of those sites you wish had just paused at a
| certain point and just stopped with what they had.
|
| Their app is even more annoying.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| Ultimate guitar is my last resort because the bloat. I also go to
| lacuerda.net but it forces me to enable cookies (not cool).
|
| I am sure I am going to try Freetar.
| 93po wrote:
| I love this, I wish all websites looked like this. UG's website
| is horrific flaming garbage. My only feedback is that I often
| picked songs to play based on the most popular/trending tabs, and
| I'd love to see that here too.
| TomJansen wrote:
| Hey! I made project like this, but I reverse engineered the API
| from the Ultimate Guitar android application. I used BurpSuite
| and Frida to look at all the HTTPS requests that the app made and
| went on from there
| InCityDreams wrote:
| ....please tell us more!
| mirkules wrote:
| This is awesome. May I please make one request which would make
| my life so easy - can you wrap the chords in square brackets?
| Tools like MySongbook will highlight the chords that way
| rzr wrote:
| Something similar for piano learners would be welcome
| nativeit wrote:
| 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.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| The core of UltimateGuitar is the content from OLGA, which is
| why this particular enshittification is so ludicrous.
| bfors wrote:
| Wow, what a perfect website
| jredwards wrote:
| https://www.songsterr.com/ is an alternative site with a much
| better UI
| mfashby wrote:
| It's still got nearly half the page covered in ads, on mobile.
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