logoalt Hacker News

Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

54 pointsby neogenixtoday at 8:13 PM39 commentsview on HN

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.


Comments

gstetoday 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

adrianhtoday 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. :)

show 2 replies
deckar01today 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/

shermantanktoptoday 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.

worldsaviortoday at 8:28 PM

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

show 1 reply
cwt137today 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.

XCSmetoday 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.

show 1 reply
dieselgatetoday 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?

show 3 replies
blaufasttoday at 11:25 PM

Thank you!

rc5150today at 9:36 PM

Give me a tool that scrapes tabs from Ultimate-Guitar and I'll be a happy camper :)

show 3 replies
Diogenesiantoday 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.

show 2 replies
kiaansaraiyatoday 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!

show 2 replies
ohadkrtoday at 10:01 PM

[dead]