What this does
It opens a Guitar Pro file and shows it as Guitar Pro would: standard notation and tab together, or either alone, for any of its tracks. It plays the music with a cursor that follows along, at any speed you like, and saves it as a PDF to print or a MIDI file for other software. It is for the tab a teacher sent you, the transcriptions you downloaded years ago, or your own songs on a computer without Guitar Pro.
Everything happens in your browser. The file never leaves your machine.
How to use it
- Drop a Guitar Pro file onto the tool, or press “Choose a Guitar Pro file”.
- Read it. Choose which tracks to show, and whether to see notation and tab, tab only or notation only; the size control makes it bigger or smaller.
- Press Play. Click any note to play from there.
- Press Download PDF or Download MIDI to save it.
Guitar Pro to PDF
The PDF is the score as you see it here: the tracks you chose, with notation, tab or both, on A4 or Letter. Two things set it apart from printing the page. It is drawn as real vector pages, every line, curve and number an instruction to the printer rather than a picture, so it is sharp at any size and the fret numbers stay text you can search. And it is paginated by line of music: a system that would not fit at the bottom of a page starts the next one, so nothing is cut in half, which is exactly what a browser’s own print does to a score. The music is the size Guitar Pro prints it, about two bars to a line; set Print size to Large for 30% bigger, to read from a music stand further away. Text in a script the PDF’s fonts do not cover, such as a Japanese title, is drawn by your browser into the PDF as an image, so it still prints.
Guitar Pro to MIDI
The MIDI file is the music as the player plays it, made by the same generator. Each instrument is its own named MIDI track with its Guitar Pro sound, so a DAW opens it as a band, not a single lane. Repeats and alternate endings are played out in order, tempo changes happen where the score has them, tied notes are held, dead notes are short muted hits, and the drums are on channel 10, where every General MIDI device expects them. Bends and vibrato become pitch bends. A MIDI file has 16 channels where Guitar Pro 3 to 5 allow 64, so a big band is fitted into 16, every instrument on a channel of its own for as long as there are channels to give.
Practising with it
The player is built for learning a part, not just hearing it. Slow it down to 25%, 50% or anything up to 150% without changing the pitch of the notes. Drag across the notes to choose a passage and turn on Loop to play it over and over. Add a metronome, or a bar of count-in clicks before the music starts. With a band file, Mute your own instrument and play along with the rest, or Solo it to hear your part alone, and each track’s volume slider, which starts in the middle, turns a part up or down a little. Full screen gives the score the whole screen, with the playback controls above it, to read from at a distance.
Which files it opens
| File | Made by | Opens |
|---|---|---|
| .gp3, .gp4, .gp5 | Guitar Pro 3, 4 and 5 | Yes |
| .gpx | Guitar Pro 6 | Yes |
| .gp | Guitar Pro 7 and 8 | Yes |
| .musicxml, .mxl | MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and others | Yes |
| .gtp from Guitar Pro 1 and 2 | Guitar Pro 1 and 2 | No |
| .ptb | PowerTab | No; Guitar Pro or TuxGuitar can save it as .gp5 |
| .tg | TuxGuitar | No; TuxGuitar can export it as .gp5 |
Measured
A viewer is judged by the files it fails on, so this one was run against every Guitar Pro file in one guitarist’s collection: 2,139 files, being 942 .gp5, 734 .gp from Guitar Pro 7 and 8, 460 .gpx and three older .gp3 and .gp4. Measured on a desktop computer:
- 2,137 opened (99.9%). One of the other two is a whole-album transcription of 1,016 bars, beyond the 1,000 this viewer opens; the other is damaged.
- Every file that opened made a MIDI file with its notes, and a PDF.
- Laying a score out for print took 9 ms for the median file. Writing its PDF took 0.16 seconds, under half a second for 95% of files and 2.8 seconds at most. PDFs were a median 112 KB and two pages.
- The PDF is the size Guitar Pro prints. 484 of the files have Guitar Pro’s own PDF of them alongside. Read the same way, Guitar Pro spaces the tab lines 6.4 to 6.8 points apart, depending on its version, and fits 2.2 bars to a line; this viewer’s PDF spaces them 6.5 points apart and fits 2.3.
Whether the output is right is checked against answers written by hand: seven test pieces that between them use every note length, tuplets, ties, dead notes, bends, slides, repeats, seven time signatures and every fret on every string, and a three-piece band with drums. The MIDI of each has every note at the right moment and pitch. And each PDF, read back by our own PDF to Guitar Pro converter, gives back every note and every length of every bar.
Limitations
It plays General MIDI sounds, not Guitar Pro’s. The player uses a small General MIDI sound bank, so a distorted guitar sounds like a keyboard’s idea of one. Guitar Pro’s own realistic sounds, and the audio tracks Guitar Pro 8 can hold, are not played. Its instruments are not equally loud either, so the player evens them out, and plays the drums a little above the rest so they are heard under a band; the MIDI download keeps the file’s own balance.
It is a viewer, not an editor. Notes cannot be changed here. To fix a tab, open it in Guitar Pro, TuxGuitar or MuseScore.
Line breaks follow the page, not the file. The PDF and the view lay the music out to the width they have, so systems break in different places from the ones Guitar Pro would print, and the fonts are open ones that stand in for Guitar Pro’s.
Credits
The notation engine and player are alphaTab, by Daniel Kuschny and contributors, under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. The sound bank is SONiVOX’s General MIDI set from the Android Open Source Project, under the Apache License 2.0. Music symbols on screen are drawn in Steinberg’s Bravura, and in the PDF in TabOtter Music, a version of Bravura cut down for embedding; both are under the SIL Open Font License, as are the Noto fonts used for the PDF’s text.