Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 129 posts

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

#111

Post by rozab »

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…

I suspect it would take a long while for an open source project to run into this limitation, especially if the tabs were distributed soulseek-style.

Has anyone attempted to make a fair use for education argument about this? Tabs aren't so much an actual creative work as instructions for how best to play a work. Because there's no timing information it's often impossible to reconstruct the actual music just from them.

Chords have even less information, a guitar chord transcription may have no resemblance to the notes actually played in a recording.

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

#112

Post by mdaniel »

ctenb wrote: post #70

I made a similar web app a few years ago. I think it competes quite well with this one. It has syntax highlighting :) https://tabviewer.app/

relevant: https://github.com/tablature-viewer/tablature-viewer.github....

WRT the sibling comment, and your "click for the repo" comment, unless we're now honoring the "license":"ISC" in package.json as formally legal, there is no license in your repo

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

#113

Post by nyjah »

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…

Dang, that’s a bummer to hear about Oliver Tree. Love his schtick, never realized he was taking the music so seriously. I always assumed it was intentionally simple to the point of mockery.

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

#114

Post by MSFT_Edging »

berniedurfee wrote: post #103
marricks wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only things from that era that didn’t get outright worse stayed the same (Craigslist). What was beautiful about the internet then was there were so many corners were monetization either wasn’t easy or wasn’t chased so things could just exist. Not so anymore!

Craigslist needs to be added to the list of national historical sites and should _never ever_ be allowed to change.

They've made small, thought out changes over the years that improved things. Small things like better gallery image handling and some filtering.

As long as they maintain that pace, I'm fine with some changes.

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

#115

Post by jamesponddotco »

globular-toast wrote: post #107
jamesponddotco wrote: post #67

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

Why does Wikipedia need one? The alternative project doesn't seem to explain this. (In fact, none of them do, but I can probably guess what's bad about most of them if I don't already know).

Among other things, it implements a whole new interface[1] that removes the "nagging" from Wikipedia. It also removes all tracking. The interface was a lot cleaner and was completely JavaScript-free until a few months ago, which is why I added it to the list.

While I personally don't mind the default Wikipedia website and actually prefer it, I can see why some people would want something more "modern".

[1] Which I dislike, but I digress.

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

#117

Post by InCityDreams »

TomJansen wrote: post #98

Hey! I made project like this, but I reverse engineered the API from the Ultimate Guitar android application. I used BurpSuite and Frida to look at all the HTTPS requests that the app made and went on from there

....please tell us more!

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

#118

Post by titzer »

LesZedCB wrote: post #74
titzer wrote: post #62

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 he…

hint, check out the history/revisions button at the top right on songsterr also, i just learned elsewhere on the thread that musescore is FOSS and loads all formats of guitar pro files!

Thanks for the reference. I think at this point I kind of want to just build my own UI to playback GP files. I looked into the guts of TuxGuitar and was pretty put off by how much code there is. It's kind of a hot mess. Really I want to use it to riff more in a jamming mode, more than a sit-down seriously study a piece of music. It needs to be useable from a standing/jamming position and have simplified controls like stop, start, tempo up, down, flip these tracks on and off, repeat this riff or section (but without a hard stop, just loop around, staying in time). TuxGuitar is clearly designed for people to make tabs, and not so much for playing along.

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

#119

Post by qwery »

rozab wrote: post #111
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…

I suspect it would take a long while for an open source project to run into this limitation, especially if the tabs were distributed soulseek-style. Has anyone attempted to make a fair use for education argument about this? Tabs aren't so much an actual creative work as instructions for how best to play a work. Because there's no timing information it's often impossible to reconstruct the actual music just from them.…

The transcriptions (created by people) are always going to be seen as derivative works, unfortunately. It doesn't matter how closely it matches the recorded performance. But the fact that text-based tabs remained online (at least more so than transcriptions, powertabs, etc.) is likely because of the lower fidelity.

It's not just that the transcription is a (transformed) reproduction of the original piece. The record companies have the (exclusive) right to (sell) the transcriptions, sheet music, etc. of music they hold the rights to. They have that right, regardless of if they are actively or ever going to actually publish any.

I would guess a fair use defence would be feasible in the right case, but I'm not sure if that was ever tested in court. Most of the operators of tab websites were just people, they didn't stand a chance. If I remember correctly, Ultimate Guitar was/is one of the few sites that was big enough to negotiate with the MPA.

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

#120

Post by Cogito »

buildsjets wrote: post #106
skrebbel wrote: post #88

Nitpick suggestion: Maybe link to Poetry for those of us not deeply in Python land? It was non-trivial for me to figure out that it’s some sort of package manager for Python. It’s also totally un-googleable so that didn’t help :-)

This right here. I was interested right up until I got to “You need poetry.”, at which point I closed the browser window. I have plenty to do without trying track down some rando developer’s dependencies.

Just FYI, for those who aren't neck deep in python land all the time, python is going through a bit of a packaging, environment, and dependency management explosion at the moment.

Lots of competing ideas and implementations are being thrown around, though probably not as bad as when javascript went through the same process. There is definitely a large benefit to seeing how things like rust have handled this space.

Anyway, poetry is part of this explosion, but is one of the relatively better known and widely distributed options, so much so that for anyone on-the-inside it probably seems obvious.

Post reply on HN