Ultimate-Guitar.com has a massive database of guitar tabs but their interface is infested with distractions and monetization schemes. Fortunately, it’s readily yoinkable into an extensible format.
For one, we’ve been 0 days, 7 hours and 38 minutes away from the pro subscription sale ending for what seems like an eternity. Beyond tricking newcomers being unethical, it’s an incredibly distracting banner that follows you even as you scroll through your tab. And they have an auto-playing video (that I don’t think is even playing the same song every time) to advertise their pro program. And finally, the classic email/account harvisting popup scheme seen on almost every monetized website in existance. In all, you have to x out of 3 seperate distractions every time you open a page.
(note that the banner doesn’t get dimmed by the overlay)
Unfortunately, ultimate-guitar is the also the most complete site when it comes to tabs so you often will need it as a reference. It’s just so unfortunate that their interface makes the site almost unusable.
The primary feature of the site is the publically available tabs. The account functionalities of the site are almost entirely useless to an end-user that just wants to read a tab.
But what if I told you that their entire 1.1 million tab database could fit into a 0.5GB zip file… And their site can be scraped to generate that database in under a week…
A file that small could easily be stored on a local drive (or even a phone!) for offline use.
tab-yoinker
tab-yoinker downloads just the source tabs from ultimate-guitar. This way, you can access
music reference without the distractions included on their terrible site.
https://git.beefslab.com/michael/tab-yoinker
In 6 steps (described in the readme), this program can scrape the entire ultimate-guitar.com tab database into an sqlite file or individual tab text files. The text files can be easily opened in any editor to view tabs offline, without distractions.