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Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com

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Re: Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com

#61

Post by MWParkerson »

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.

Re: Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com

#62

Post by titzer »

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...)

Re: Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com

#63

Post by BowBun »

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.

Re: Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com

#64

Post by lghh »

scop wrote: post #56
boringg wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? It was such a great resource for such a long time and then they just butchered it.

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…

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.

Re: Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com

#65

Post by BowBun »

alkonaut wrote: post #57
jonathrg wrote: post #55

I feel like this has to be breaking the terms of service for the site

It's community content and bandwidth can't be that big? can't someone mirror the backend too?

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.

Re: Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com

#66

Post by doublemint2203 »

BowBun wrote: post #63

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…

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.

Re: Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com

#67

Post by jamesponddotco »

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

Re: Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com

#68

Post by shermantanktop »

rockbruno wrote: post #7
cpursley wrote: post #4

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.

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.

I love/hate Guitar Pro. It’s indispensable but unstable.

Re: Freetar – an alternative front end for ultimate-guitar.com

#69

Post by mattgreenrocks »

jampekka wrote: post #39

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)?

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.

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