PT Project: Index, News. Links: Discussion Forum, Power Tab Archive, User Compositions, More Links
Issues: November 2010
Posted on November 12, 2010 by Ronald <ronald AT powertabs.org>
Welcome to the first issue of our new monthly Tablature News! We've heard from many of you that you'd like to receive regular updates from us about all things relating to the Power Tab Archive and the Tab Library and so we are delighted to introduce this news page so that you can regularly hear about these projects. Today we’d like to tell you about the following topics:
1. Status of the Tab Library
2. A possible future path - Premium Tablature
3. The Power Tab Editor 2.0 Project
4. Downtime of our Discussion Forum, Registration Issue
Already in August 2010, Music Sales took over the Tab Library completely, which means that the PTA Staff does not have any influence over decisions taken there anymore. While this was expected, it also perfectly understandable. It is difficult (or rather impossible) to operate a guitar tablature site like the PTA with pure commercial interest in mind. The musicians that contribute to the a real tablature site won't fit into a commercial scheme, which is not devoted to creating the highest quality transcriptions available, but rather interested in exploiting the - still more than unclear - situation around sheet music publishing rights in some blatant way. One of the main issues is that they neglect the work of transcribers, i.e. in their opinion, once a tab is uploaded it does not belong to the tabber anymore, which is exactly the opposite of what the PTA always wanted to achieve. Transcribing music and typesetting a transcription is an art, and transcribers are artists. This has to be emphasized, e.g. by "legalizing" public transcribing. Nevertheless we are more than thankful to Music Sales for providing a public download opportunity of many PTA tabs and wish them best of luck for their tablature site project.
The current situation of guitar tablature on the web has to be improved. As already summarized above, there must be a way to publish highest quality guitar tablature on the Web and to emphasize the art of transcribing. We launched another attempt to change the situation. Together with a large music consultancy in the UK, we aim at obtaining rights to publish tablature at a new website. Right now, we are collecting brilliant tablature to discuss publishing options with major music labels. Of course, none of these labels will talk to a tablature site, that's why the music consultancy will lead the discussions with them. If you are a professional transcriber and are interested in posting your tablature visit http://www.premiumtabs.com/ for more information.
The real PTE 2.0 software was abandoned by Brad Larsen himself many years ago. However, although Guitar Pro is continuously improving and also professional music typesetting software like Finale and Sibelius is available to create good-looking guitar tablature, it would still be more than preferable to develop a successor to the PTE 1.7, optimally released under an open-source license. Some of you are already using TuxGuitar, and most of us appreciate the efforts being put into the software - however, TuxGuitar is based on Guitar Pro and does not serve the purpose of creating complex, high-quality transcriptions well. That's why a new project has been initiated, dubbed "The Power Tab Editor 2.0 Project", see all about it at http://www.powertabs.org/twodotzero.php including a link to its Google code page. It is in a very early stage and some exciting ideas and code fragments have not been posted yet. However, any input - commitment, ideas, and suggestions - is highly appreciated!
During October, the discussion forum at http://www.ptaforum.net/ was down due to hack attacks targeted at the PTA server. The attacks were operated from computers in China and utilized SQL (union) injections. We hope that we applied the correct adjustments to the site to prevent such downtimes in the future and apologize for any inconveniences the downtime might have caused. Furthermore, due to technical problems is was not possible to create new accounts recently - this has been fixed, so if you are interested in discussing with us there and do not have an account yet, we kindly invite you to create one now.
Please post any feedback and comments at our forum.
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