Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

57 points - yesterday at 8:13 PM


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.

Source

Comments

gste yesterday at 10:57 PM
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

nomilk yesterday at 11:59 PM
I stopped playing guitar before youtube came out, so I only ever used tab books. Those official sources often contained mistakes (the transcriber was only human). Mistakes came in different flavours; some were mere typos, but others were correct note/s in the wrong neck position, and others were slightly worse: incorrect notes, or more frequently, omitted notes (common in genres like heavy metal where the same note may be played at high frequency).

I wonder if these AI tools can outperform humans at transcription.

adrianh yesterday at 8:26 PM
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. :)

deckar01 yesterday at 11:17 PM
I’ve been working on a tool to help me discover chord inversions and find fingerings I can comfortably play. https://music.shademaps.com/
worldsavior yesterday at 8:28 PM
I don't know how exactly Claude vision works but isn't just using good old computer vision much cheaper?
shermantanktop yesterday at 10:39 PM
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.

cwt137 yesterday at 9:57 PM
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.
XCSme yesterday at 9:54 PM
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.

dieselgate yesterday at 9:32 PM
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?

blaufast yesterday at 11:25 PM
Thank you!
Diogenesian yesterday at 9:14 PM
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.

rc5150 yesterday at 9:36 PM
Give me a tool that scrapes tabs from Ultimate-Guitar and I'll be a happy camper :)
kiaansaraiya yesterday at 8:24 PM
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!
ohadkr yesterday at 10:01 PM
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