youtube-guitar-tab-parser - CLI tool to convert YouTube guitar lessons to PDF tabs
Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser
Transform any YouTube guitar lesson video into a clean, printable PDF tablature with this powerful CLI tool. By leveraging Claude vision and advanced frame sampling, it automatically detects the tab region, crops relevant frames, and deduplicates lines based on bar numbers to eliminate redundant cursor movements. The result is a perfectly stitched PDF document ready for practice, complete with the video title as a heading. Requiring only Node.js, yt-dlp, ffmpeg, and an Anthropic API key, this tool streamlines the learning process by turning dynamic video content into static, easy-to-read sheet music instantly.
Because the bar number is constant while the playback cursor sweeps a line and only changes when the score advances, this collapses all the near-identical cursor frames of a line into a single page.
- gste
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 ;-)
- adrianh
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. :)
- worldsavior
I don't know how exactly Claude vision works but isn't just using good old computer vision much cheaper?
- XCSme
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.
- shermantanktop
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.