Posted by neogenix 3 hours ago
There are services that transcribe music from Youtube videos into tabs, but they never work well enough for me. Instead I'm taking a simpler approach. It downloads the video, samples frames, uses Claude vision to locate the tab region, crops every frame to that region, de-duplicates the crops by the bar number printed on each line of the score, and stitches the distinct tab lines vertically into a PDF.
I didn't test it on a lot of different Youtube videos yet, so problem will arise for sure.
I link to a Patreon in my videos that lets you pay a membership to download the full tabs in PDFs.
Here I was thinking AI might soon replace my painstakingly slow tab transcription efforts altogether. But I never thought about someone just ripping it from the video...
Let me know if it works ;-)
Kudos from one of the Soundslice guys — we've been making web-based tab and sheet music stuff since 2012. :)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07N4VVSmYLU&list=RD07N4VVSmYLU...
…exactly the way you described. Pause, screenshot, adjust color/contrast, assemble in a pdf. Super annoying.
That sounds like it can get quite costly. Probably there are ways to do it without AI, I would rather manually annotate the tab area with a visual editor.
This is interesting and all but seems to use computer vision rather than audio processing?
You need to both work out the chords and also decide on fingerings a human could perform. Seems possible, but more then just audio processing
> the existing tab from the page would be more efficient and precise
But what about songs that aren't made into a YT video?
I don't think your software is (or should be) illegal. But it's a form of theft, and incredibly unethical. These people worked very hard on these tabs and don't make much money. You (and kiaansaraiya and neogenix) should be ashamed of yourselves. You don't deserve your guitar if you steal tabs from working musicians.
In some cases, the composer makes the video, and is sharing their own work.
In other cases, the transcribed part is not a composed part, and the composer who is listed (Lennon/McCartney) did not write or perform it (e.g. Ringo's drums).
In yet other cases, the composer was long dead before the recording was made, and the melody being transcribed is meaningfully different than the one they composed. Common in jazz.
"Composer" is a 19th century idea, enshrined in copyright law in the 1920's in order to protect the people who made sheet music for piano players to play in their parlor. Musical expression deserves attribution and protection, but let's not pretend the name on the liner notes is a Beethoven with a long quill creating a work of genius out of their solo effort.
https://www.thatgreatcomposer.com/blog/is-it-legal-to-transc...
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/96352/dual-question-...
https://www.drumforum.org/threads/what-is-the-legal-basis-fo...
Not under US Copyright Law, it isn’t. Transcribing is derivative, not transformative.
Inevitably the transcriber makes decisions in how to deviate from the reference recording, be it omission of instruments, microchanges in tempo and pitch or articulation. In theory a good transcription is an exact graphical representation of the abstract sonic intent of the artist.
Of course, if you are combining voices, changing chords, it approaches an arrangement which is a more creative endeavor.
the same "working" musicians who didn't write the music they're making tabs for, didn't get any permission from the original artists, and in many cases aren't actually playing/tabbing the parts as originally written.
A "working" musician is someone who doesn't monetize someone else's work, regardless of how super hard it must be to write a PDF.
I'd say someone should take your guitar away but I'd bet money you're not doing anything groundbreaking with it anyway.
But if you do find that they made something valuable that you can’t find elsewhere, then you should compensate them for that. Because yes, it is a lot of work.