Linux Guitar Tab - or Not…

I have had no luck whatsoever with guitar software on linux.   The effects software squeals, farts, and generally refuses to work.  My ten minute exposure to tab editor/players was very similar.

Feeling brave (or forgetting what I learned), I downloaded some tab last night.  Some were visual, some in various formats for players.  The range of tab available is positively frightening.  You can find anything from completely out of key and out of the universe to how in the world did he figure that out?

Tonight I put aside my post-traumatic stress disorder and decided to take advantage of the wide world of open source tab applications.  Since it’s been a few years since my bad experience, I figured the field (and software) had matured to the point where it was not only working, but working well.

Sometimes I’m so ridiculously optimistic that I should kill myself.

A quick search of Synaptic and the web turned up gnometab, eTktab, kguitar, and tuxguitar.  What follows is my review of each.  Equipment is a Dell D531 laptop and a Dell E4300 laptop, both with Xubuntu 8.04 (the 4300 being less than a week old).

Tuxguitar:  this is an application that does not tease.  You summon it and it immediately delivers the goods.  I summoned it and it immediately failed to even come up.  Same thing on the second laptop.

eTktab: I spent a while trying to figure out how to convince it to come up until I discovered that you have to capitalize the `T’.  It came up much better than Tuxguitar.  In fact it came up one hundred percent better than Tuxguitar.  Unfortunately it would only open its own format; none of the files I had were in that format, so it was of extremely limited use.

gnometab: This also came up.  You may be noticing a theme.. I’m happy to just see some sort of programmatic interface take its place on the screen.  Maybe now my wife will stop saying that I have unreasonable expectations (yeah, right).  Gnometab brought a new paradigm to the concept of tab players tonight: it not only came up, but every time I loaded a file, it crashed with rapidity and certainty.  This was repeated with each type of file on both laptops.

kguitar: of the four pieces of software, this was the winner.  Like two of the others, kguitar managed to start.  This was a big plus, as far as I was concerned.  It even stayed alive and onscreen while I went to look at its settings.  Any program that allows you four choices of fretboard wood can’t be that bad, can it?  I did notice that it didn’t have a setting for left-handed necks (the bastards).

It turned out that the left-handed option was the least of my worries.  If the program managed to stay up when I loaded a file, it certainly died as soon as I suggested it play the file.  Unreasonable expectations, I know.  This program brought a bit of its own panache to the fray though, in terms of it dying with its interface onscreen.  It just sat there and stared at me, forcing me to dispose of it via the XKILL command.

Not satisfied with just this, I experimented further.  Each file opened shows up in a new window/interface.  This way when you hit PLAY, you can hose two interfaces at the same time.  Oh, joy!

Finally I managed to not only get the program to stay alive, I even got a file loaded.  I told my wife to put 911 on speed-dial while I hit PLAY.  This had the effect of the graphical interface indicating it was actually PLAYING.  Unfortunately the audio interface was apparently never noticed so it just sat there, in its quietude, not bothering me at all.

I figured I’d outsmart myself (or the software) by trying it on a fresh Ubuntu install but it turns out I was already outsmarted because all of it failed to work in exactly the same manner on the second laptop.

The entire episode turned out to be less exciting, or even pleasant, than I had hoped.   And there was not so much as a sound to show for it.

I wish to thank the authors, as well as all open source software folks, for their time and effort.  Honestly.  I’m sure it worked on their systems and possibly several others.  I’m not picking on them or their software.  I just wish it would have worked on my systems.