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...)
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.
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...)