Guitar Tab API?

Question

Hello everyone,

I was just curious if anyone has heard of any sort of API for guitar tabs? The thought passed through my mind that it would be really neat if I could grab guitar tabs from the internet to bring into my C# app, but haven't been able to find anything.

Thanks, Chris

Answer 1

You can use System.Net.WebRequest to read the repository of your choice.

You can also use System.ServiceModel.Syndication.SyndicationFeed to read RSS feeds.

EDIT: Try scraping http://www.mxtabs.net/guitar_tabs/ using WebRequest.

You can write code that sends requests to the pages of that (or any other) website and parses the responses to extract information.

However, you might want to get their permission first. They might even offer you an API.

Answer 2

http://www.911tabs.com/ seems to have a large selection, and they appear to all be a variant of ASCII-art, so it would be relatively easy to write an HTML- or text-scraping routine. They don't appear to use a very standardized format, however, so this might be more work than I think.

Answer 3

To scrape a web page, first figure out exactly which data you want to extract.

Visit the relevant pages with Fiddler running, and look at the HTTP requests and responses that you get.

You can then write C# code that requests the relevant page and reads through the response, line by line, looking for lines that you're interested in.

If the web page is XHTML compliant, you can also parse it using XDocument, but most web pages aren't.

Answer 4

You should approach it from another angle.. Why isn't there a good data format to transfer guitar tab data? I mean, ASCII art is good but it is easily damaged, and it doesn't convery timing information well.

If you could come up with a format that could reach critical mass, that would be a good thing.

Answer 5

I would suggest writing your own API as a WebService. You would need to find out the legalities of this, since the music itself is copyrighted and un-distributable usually. I would recommend storing them in a SQL database as BLOB fields, like in the example here. Or always look at MSDN, like here.

I would also look into magazines like Guitar World, and contact their editors to see if they can help you. Like here.

I still like the hamster idea best though...

SCREEN SCRAPING WEBSITES IS NOT VERY C#. STAY AWAY FROM HTML HACKS, THIS IS .NET FOLKS.

Answer 6

Still haven't found anything good at there as for an API that delivers tablature.