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Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

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Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

#1

Post by neogenix »

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.

Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser
github.com

Re: Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

#3

Post by adrianh »

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. :)

Re: Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

#5

Post by neogenix »

adrianh wrote: post #3

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. :)

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).

Re: Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

#6

Post by neogenix »

kiaansaraiya wrote: post #2

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!

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.

Re: Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

#7

Post by neogenix »

worldsavior wrote: post #4

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

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 :-)

Re: Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

#8

Post by Diogenesian »

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.

Re: Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

#9

Post by breaker-kind »

Diogenesian wrote: post #8

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 mus…

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

Re: Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

#10

Post by Diogenesian »

breaker-kind wrote: post #9
Diogenesian wrote: post #8

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 mus…

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

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