Top
Best
New

Posted by neogenix 5 hours ago

Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser(github.com)
I created a simple CLI that turns a YouTube guitar-lesson video into a PDF of the guitar tab.

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.

54 points | 40 commentspage 2
rc5150 3 hours ago|
Give me a tool that scrapes tabs from Ultimate-Guitar and I'll be a happy camper :)
asdff 2 hours ago||
There are examples on github from the beforetimes (preai). I made my own little version with a basic ui in python a couple years ago. Works pretty good. Best to pull the powertab or guitar pro tab versions though and open in tuxguitar.

Here is what I was cribbing from with my own version. Seems they updated it since.

https://github.com/jabbey1/UGDownloader

mrln 2 hours ago|||
Let me introduce you to freetar! It currently has issues due to cloudflare blocking, however I have already created a pull request that fixes this [0]. Given the code is pretty straightforward, turning it into a scraper shouldn't be too hard of a task!

Here's a working version: https://freetar.sievers.dev

[0] https://github.com/kmille/freetar/pull/90

smalltorch 2 hours ago||
This is one i could get behind. I mean, all the tabs are crowdsourced anyway so why can you throw up the paywall only after all the tabs are made.

I only need the clean tab and transposing would be nice.

TerminalTabs anyone?

bstsb 2 hours ago||
as far as i remember only the Pro tabs are paywalled (the ones created professionally)? the community tabs are all freely available on web, and carry little restrictions on mobile
smalltorch 2 hours ago||
Exactly why I can get behind a scrape here. They are already freely accessable.

I don't like having to switch to desktop mode to transpose though. They want you to get the app to do it on mobile which is enough of a reason to make a special program to do exactly what I want.

Also, scraping chord charts is in a different catagory from tabs. I can't even actually read tabs but with a chord chart you can get close enough to noodle around and emulate. Good enough for my needs.

thorncorona 35 minutes ago||
> Exactly why I can get behind a scrape here. They are already freely accessable.

I think in most cases it is the effort that is the gate. Ex. you can DDOS most public facing services simply by spamming AI.

kiaansaraiya 4 hours ago||
i've actually been looking for something like this for so long. all the online transcribers make me pay and i just wanna learn how play songs from a video. this is a great idea!
neogenix 4 hours ago||
I had exactly the same issue. I'm learning to play guitar and don't want to pay 8,50 per tab. I simply want to learn something new and discard it. I noticed I'm learning faster if it's printed then on-screen.
rc5150 3 hours ago||
learn by ear! It's free and you don't need youtube!
RyanOD 3 hours ago|||
This is absolutely true...but it takes a LOT of time. Fortunately, I first picked up a guitar when I was 13.

I can't imagine getting started with any instrument as an adult. Actually, I'm trying to improve my piano playing right now and it's nearly impossible.

sublinear 3 hours ago|||
This is very true. Tabs can help in niche cases where the precision really matters, but most tabs are not that good unless written by the original artist (rare).

If I had spent my first year learning the instrument properly, I wouldn't have wasted the next decade after that fumbling around so much.

ohadkr 3 hours ago|
[dead]