Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser(github.com)

46 points by neogenix 3 hours ago | 36 comments

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.

gste 23 minutes ago |

So I'm a bass guitarist, and I've made some of these exact videos.

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 ;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2i-Lwoe2Ow

adrianh 2 hours ago |

I'm curious how it works for videos that contain moving tab (as in, the playhead stays in the center while the tab moves behind it). Seems like that sort of tab wouldn't work with this approach...?

Kudos from one of the Soundslice guys — we've been making web-based tab and sheet music stuff since 2012. :)

mschulkind 1 hour ago | |

I don't have an answer, but wanted to say that I started using Soundslice about 9 months ago and I absolutely love it. It does exactly the part of transcribing that I want done for me and nothing more, which is basically none of it except the boring stuff.

adrianh 1 hour ago | | |

Hey, great to hear! Thanks for taking the time to write that. :) Keep transcribing and playing music!

devin 1 hour ago | | |

Care to sell me on it? How dose it compare to musescore?

neogenix 2 hours ago | |

It wouldn't work for that type of video. As far as I've seen almost all tutorial videos on Youtube have a fixed tab bar though. I'm using it only for learning guitar (i'm a beginner).

shermantanktop 41 minutes ago |

I learned this one:

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.

worldsavior 2 hours ago |

I don't know how exactly Claude vision works but isn't just using good old computer vision much cheaper?

neogenix 2 hours ago | |

Yes, for sure. You could probably train a specific vision model for this style of image parsing and run it on device for free. However, this was much easer to make :-)

XCSme 1 hour ago |

I was excited to use it, as I really wanted something like this, then I realized it needs AI/Claude (?)

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.

motoxpro 28 minutes ago | |

How would you do this without SOME sort of vision/audio model? Are you saying just not an LLM?

XCSme 9 minutes ago | | |

Manually select a rectangle on a video frame, then do basic computer vision to detect notes, or even a simple image processing algorithm to find the lines and notes.

dieselgate 1 hour ago |

Are there technical hurdles around just programmatically generating a tab from any song or audio recording itself?

This is interesting and all but seems to use computer vision rather than audio processing?

gcy 14 minutes ago | |

As far as I know, there still isn’t a tool that can reliably produce usable transcriptions out of the box, although the results for solo piano can be reasonably good. A lack of high-quality labeled training data, especially for instruments other than piano, is probably part of the reason. But the problem is also more complicated than it might initially seem: you have to handle polyphony, overlapping harmonics, timing and articulation. And in the case of guitar tabs, it's even more complicated as one needs to determine what tuning is used (if not standard), which string and fret produced each note. Or separately rearrange the tab.

simonok 1 hour ago | |

Using computer vision to read the existing tab from the page would be more efficient and precise than trying to use audio processing to isolate individual notes from a single instrument in a potentially busy audio track. The existing tabs also nail down which string and fret is used for each note, which would be a difficult task for audio processing because there are multiple combinations of string and fret for any given note. For example, an open G can also be played on the 5th fret of the D string, or the 10th fret of the A string, or the 15th fret of the E string.

dieselgate 15 minutes ago | | |

I understand but would assume it could be solved by chord/positional groupings or similar. Manual/human tab transcription need to infer positional assumptions anyway; some artists will play the same songs different ways too ala Bob Weir

> the existing tab from the page would be more efficient and precise

But what about songs that aren't made into a YT video?

cwt137 1 hour ago |

It would be nice to have a link to an example YT video to see what exactly the AI is trying to locate on the screen.

rc5150 1 hour ago |

Give me a tool that scrapes tabs from Ultimate-Guitar and I'll be a happy camper :)

asdff 42 minutes 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 42 minutes 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 58 minutes 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 53 minutes 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

kiaansaraiya 2 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 2 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 1 hour ago | |

learn by ear! It's free and you don't need youtube!

RyanOD 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.

Diogenesian 2 hours ago |

Almost all those people charge for the PDFs. They know the PDF is more useful, that's why the video is free.

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.

breaker-kind 2 hours ago | |

counterargument -- these people are making money off of transcribing other people's parts, with no profits shared with the composers.

shermantanktop 24 minutes ago | | |

No.

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.

Diogenesian 2 hours ago | | |

That's a bad counterargument. Transcribing is transformative. Copying a video into a PDF is not.

rc5150 1 hour ago | |

"you don't deserve your guitar if you steal tabs from working musicians"

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.

earthnail 1 hour ago | | |

But then the solution is to just ignore these musicians.

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.