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Songsterr


hellothere
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Quite alot of the tabs I used where form bassmasta. Now songsterr has brought their domain name and a whole lot of the tabs have dissapeared for good :)

So I've been looking at this songsterr and it has some quite nice features for free, which stopped me being as annoyed. One of them is a, don't know the technical term so I'll call it, a "play along" feature, which I imagine will come in quite handy. However alot of the features are onl available to paying users, that is fair enough at face value but two of the features missing are full-screen mode and half-speed mode, without which the usefullness of the "play alongerer" is reduced alot.

No problem I thought, I can afford to pay $20 a year of whatever they are probably charging, but when I went to subscribe it costs $99 per year, which to me seems alot for what you get.

Also as far as I can tell the tabs are submitted by people so really they are just charging for the use of their player and it's features.

I was wondering if anyone shared my opinion or could explain why it is so pricey?

If you have no idea what I am on about then take a look at songsterr.com

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[quote name='hellothere' post='1242513' date='May 24 2011, 12:49 AM']Songsterr have a site aswell as an app. I'm talking about the site.

And they have bought the domain name of bassmasta so trying to go to bassmasta now takes you to there site. Bassmasta, along with it's tabs, will be deleted.[/quote]

yeah I had the bassmasta site saved as a bookmark on my phone, the web page is so complicated now, it won't load!

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Glad I'm not alone in thinking Bassmasta is all buggered up.....hasn't been the same for a while now.
In fact I onlt tend to go there as a last resort nowadays.

Since I found Songsterr I constantly use that along with Ultimate-Guitar.

As for the Songsterr site itself and all the other features on it, can't say I've ever bothered with them, I just use the site as it comes, no extra payment, no extra wee gadgets, just basically using what I see. I don't have a problem with that tbh......I get to learn the song in the end...job done!

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I've found it, the previous owner uploaded a torrent of all the tabs so you can have all the tabs from the site saved to your computer and view them through your browser.

A quick google search will find it for you if anyone is interested and it is about 1GB in size.

And songsterr seems ok I'm just annoyed that A) they bought the domain name for bassmasta and :) that they are trying to charge me to make the tab go fullscreen/zoom in on it.

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Apparantly it was the MPAA threatening Bassmasta's owner with a lawsuit that forced his hand - as Songsterr already have a commercial agreement in place, this wasn't an issue for them.

Edit: might explain why they encourage people to use the paid version though...

Edited by fatboyslimfast
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[quote name='fatboyslimfast' post='1243025' date='May 24 2011, 03:14 PM']Apparantly it was the MPAA threatening Bassmasta's owner with a lawsuit that forced his hand - as Songsterr already have a commercial agreement in place, this wasn't an issue for them.

Edit: might explain why they encourage people to use the paid version though...[/quote]
How a txt tabb bares any relation to a song in reality is beyond me.

Songsterr is great, however I moved away from tabb and now learn most things from dots and my own lead sheets.

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Only thing I use tabs for is if I can't quite hear what a section of a bassline is doing, and need a pointer rather than making it up myself as best I can.

Obv, I realise that if [i]I[/i] can't hear it then the tabber might also be guessing...but if we both come up with the same then I know I've a sporting chance of being correct!

Edited by fatboyslimfast
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[quote name='fatboyslimfast' post='1243041' date='May 24 2011, 03:26 PM']Only thing I use tabs for is if I can't quite hear what a section of a bassline is doing, and need a pointer rather than making it up myself as best I can.

Obv, I realise that if [i]I[/i] can't hear it then the tabber might also be guessing...but if we both come up with the same then I know I've a sporting chance of being correct![/quote]

He's right there you know.

Plus Tabs are free and all over the web, try finding free dots :)
If you just need a bit of a nudge cos you're brains fried, a bit of tab never hurt anyone. They may all be wrong, but they get you heaing the right way.

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For me a tab is a good place to start off when trying to work a song out, I'm only just getting to the stage of working songs out for myself but I find playing through a few different tabs of the same song often helps send me in the right direction.

And from what I read the "bassmasta" was fully protected he just sold the domain name for the money.

Apparently songster pays the artists for using tabs of their song but I havn't looked into it so I don't know exactly how that works. I can see why they might charge for using all the twiddly knobs and stuff they have, but charging to people to zoom in on something takes the piss.

Also there are so many free tabs on the internet it would be crazy to try and police them, like illegal downloading of music, it''s impossible to stop unless the internet becomes completely controlled by the goverment. However I have read an article about several British artists, no one that famous, who took legal action to get alot of sites to remove their tabs. Completely retarded. Next they will be sueing you for playing along to their CD at home :)

Anyway I will try to stop ranting about this now :)

EDIT: It seems Led Zeppelin, Portishead and a few others have had their tabs removed on copyright claims. The tabs are a representation of a series of notes, not a re-creation of the song so how can they have them removed? Unless an artist owns the series of notes they use on any record they have had published, which makes no sense. It would stop people being able to produce new music. Surely this fad can't last?

Edited by hellothere
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[quote name='hellothere' post='1243126' date='May 24 2011, 04:39 PM']EDIT: It seems Led Zeppelin, Portishead and a few others have had their tabs removed on copyright claims. The tabs are a representation of a series of notes, not a re-creation of the song so how can they have them removed? Unless an artist owns the series of notes they use on any record they have had published, which makes no sense. It would stop people being able to produce new music. Surely this fad can't last?[/quote]

Not sure I understand what you're saying here. There's been copyright on music scores since The London Stationer's Company sued Henry VIII for ripping off Greensleeves. :)

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I think what he's saying is that a tab is just a representation of pitch as depicted on a fretboard, rather than notes on a stave (which have other descriptive information in order to reproduce exactly what has been written by the artist, such as length, loudness, overall key etc), and therefore cannot be described as a score.

Edited by fatboyslimfast
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OK, I understand now. But, let's suppose I'm a music publisher. Can I publish "The Complete Led Zeppelin Book of Guitar Tab" without permission or royalties? After all, it's not a complete representation of the songs, just the pitch on the fretboard. I think that would be a very difficult argument to get past a judge. Then, as we've seen with mp3s, there's not much legal distinction between breaching copyright for money or for fun, so it doesn't really matter whether you're publishing a book or uploading to a tab site. Whether it's worth trying to police is another matter.

There's also the issue of tab sites charging. If it's purely to cover royalties, that might be ok, but if people really are dilligently transcribing songs (rather than copying from their mate's tab book), should someone else be building a business out of it? There's been some arguments about The Huffington Post building the site on writing people did for free and then selling out to AOL for $315m.

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same as other people here I used to occasionally dip into bassmasta for odd little bits of tab that i couldn't quite get by ear so was surprised to find it all changed to songsterr the other day.

however, if you're after a particular song just pop it into google and when it comes up in the results click the 'cached' bit instead of the main 'bassmasta' link (which now redirects to songsterr) and it brings up the original bassmasta page not the songsterr one.



peace

c

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[quote name='hellothere' post='1250384' date='May 30 2011, 03:20 PM']Did yu follow all the instructions in the readme file?[/quote]

Hi. yes. But I have a load of folders with un-named web pages now in there. I'm a bit of a Muppet with this sort of thing tho.

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Guitar Pro is a good program, most user submitted tabs on the net are pop, rock, and metal but that's what I'm after :) You can also play along to the tabs either as MIDI, or a reasonable sounding 'Realistic Sound Engine'. It's not free... but I might have been tempted to be a bit naughty and get a cracked version. Not saying I did, or that you should do that with it being illegal and all :)

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