Several problems with guitar tabs

• May 30, 2012 - 20:16

Hello everyone,

I'm a guitarist using Linux and I've been looking for a software to write/work with guitar tabulatures. So far, I've been working with TuxGuitar - which is quite nice, but doesn't generate a nice printer output. Also, pasting larger areas of text (e.g., explainatory comments) between single tab lines is not possible with Tuxguitar. Both issues are nicley solved in Musescore.

However, apart from that Musescore still lacks many important features available in Tuxguitar (or GuitarPro as the other alternative). I'm currently working with Musescore Nightly 2.0 rev. b4992b4, which I compiled from source.

My issues are:
1) When I open the guitar tab template, the tab and the staff are not connectet, i.e., when I paste a "0" on the g-String, the g note doesn't appear in the staff.
2) After opening a GuitarPro file, the staff contains the notes, but the tab is empty. However, when I paste a tone into the tab, the corresponding note appears in the staff, contradictory to issue 1 ;-)
3) Working with tripplets somehow doesn't work propperly. I tried to write down the score of "Sleep Walk" in Satriani's version (beautiful piece btw.), which opens with a quarter rest followed by an eighth note. It took me some while to find out how to put all that together as a tripplet, but after saving and reopening, the tripplet was gone.
4) It is quite nasty to paste tones in the guitar tab with the up-down keys. It would be much easier if one could just enter the number.

I hope, these bugs will have been removed in the final version, cause there is a lack of a good "score-writer software" for Guitarists in the open source wold.
Tuxguitar has its own problems and limitations plus I think Tuxguitar is dead, with the last version from 2009.
Lilypond is quite difficult to use.
So: I hope that you will keep on your good work. MuseScore has a great potential for guitarists!

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