Nördnytt! 🤓Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser
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 - 5533 sekunder sedanSo 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 ;-)
- - 1802 sekunder sedan
- adrianh - 14572 sekunder sedanI'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. :)
- worldsavior - 14468 sekunder sedanI don't know how exactly Claude vision works but isn't just using good old computer vision much cheaper?
- deckar01 - 4335 sekunder sedanI’ve been working on a tool to help me discover chord inversions and find fingerings I can comfortably play. https://music.shademaps.com/
- shermantanktop - 6584 sekunder sedanI 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.
- cwt137 - 9129 sekunder sedanIt 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.
- XCSme - 9305 sekunder sedanI 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.
- dieselgate - 10626 sekunder sedanAre 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?
- blaufast - 3872 sekunder sedanThank you!
- rc5150 - 10399 sekunder sedanGive me a tool that scrapes tabs from Ultimate-Guitar and I'll be a happy camper :)
- kiaansaraiya - 14687 sekunder sedani'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!
- Diogenesian - 11705 sekunder sedanAlmost 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.
- ohadkr - 8872 sekunder sedan[dead]