Ooh, this is a godsend. UG is so full of dark patterns and nags it's almost unusable. It's a travesty and whoever runs such scam on community provided content should do some serious soul searching.
Transposing chords doesn't seem to be implemented (or should the plus/minus buttons do that)?
UG is now owned by (Muse Group), which also owns MuseScore, Audacity, StaffPad, etc.
They've had their fair share of controversy beyond just dark-patterns on UG. From adding telemetry into Audacity[0], causing a bunch of drama and multiple forks of Audacity, To (most notably, in my opinion) having their director of strategy, Daniel Ray, publicly threaten to report/have the Chinese government whisk away the developer of a Github repo for a MuseScore sheet music downloader[1]
For whatever reason, UG's omnipresent video of a guy supposedly playing the song of the currently viewed tab always grates me more than it should. Probably because it's always an acoustic regardless of song.
But also the fact it is pinned to a spot on the viewport and always moving out of the corner of my eye.
I played a ton of guitar in high school and UG was my go-to resource for a lot of stuff. I then stopped for a long time due to career, marriage, kids, etc, only to pick up the ol’ axe again this year. I dutifully opened up UG and was shocked at how horrible it was. Ok fine, I’ll download the damn app you dirty bastards. Oh, you mean I’m still accosted by all the dark patterns in the app too? I can only assume any PII given to them is sold quickly and efficiently.
FWIW, I have really enjoyed seeing what old artists have put out post-COVID. Seems like a big creativity boost. For example, I really hadn’t checked in on Joe Satriani in years. Nothing in his work had stood out to me in a long time. His 2022 “Elephants of Mars” though is just excellent. The opening track has a guitar entry at about two minutes in that you can’t help but scrunch your face and bang your head to.
Literally the same experience as me. I had not been to UG since I started my career as a dev. I now have thoughts and opinions about the internet. UG goes against basically every single one of them.
I honestly don't understand why it ended up like that. Did they really have that much trouble monetizing the largest collection of community-made content for guitar playing? Did YouTube eat their lunch in that regard? I imagine they had editorial staff for the articles (going off my 12+ year out of date memory), was that what was costing them so much? I really have no clue.
woah, me too! stopped during college and I decided to take guitar serious this time and get some lessons which i started in July. it's been a huge improvement and super fun.
check out Plini and Intervals, some of my favorites in the same vein as Satriani.
also, I've found guitar pro to really be worth it. Sheet Happens publishes official tabs, and all their PDF tab books come with guitar pro files as well and theyre pretty good quality. Sheet Happens has a permanent guitar pro discount code too.
FYI TuxGuitar is a FOSS player that can load/play/edit PowerTab and GuitarPro files. Multiplatform too. It's not completely 100% bug-free, but it's good enough to load and play most tabs flawlessly.
Or for a more robust piece of software (especially if you do tabbing/composing yourself or you want to generate/edit a tab from a MIDI file), MuseScore is also FOSS and can import GuitarPro files no problem. With its recent UI overhauls it's really become top-notch IMO.
i didn't realize musescore opened guitar pro 7/8 files (which is what sheet happens publishes)! sadly tux guitar support stopped at gp5. I will definitely be checking out musescore, thanks for the rec!
Transposing chords doesn't seem to be implemented (or should the plus/minus buttons do that)?