I've been hard at work on a project that I would like to share with you. It's called YouTab and its what I believe is a great way to sync lyrics and chords with music. The smart guys I work with use a nifty algorithm to "listen" to the music and in a lot of cases it does a really good job in getting the chords. But since technology has its limits there's an editor application that lets you fix what is wrong.
I am hoping that this will develop into a useful resource for musicians and music lovers and I'd love to hear what you think about it and get ideas as to what you might like to see next.
You should send an email to the guys at http://chordify.net/ . One of the people involved in that project has a PHD in computer science with focus on analysing music with code. They'd be great people to team up with for you.
The algorithm for generating chords does seem to work very well for simple songs, and at least makes a good stab at more complicated songs, for the guitar-driven songs I tried.
In terms of presentation and editing, I believe the guys at http://www.soundslice.com/ have a solution that is much better. I would love to see a synthesis of these two technologies, with YouTab producing a first draft of a sheet for SoundSlice based on any video.
Very cool! You've already captured a few hours of my life.
A bit of feed back on the editor -
First, in general, it's a little... mysterious? It's not immediately clear exactly what clicking in difference places will do, and it's easy to click the wrong the and have the song jump around or a element shift or something, so it ends up feeling a bit twitchy. One thing that might help is better mouse cursors, like the i-bar for moving the current play position line, or the hand for grabbing-and-repositioning.
I get what's going on with the timeline being split in three horizontal rows, but I still find it kind of confusing, especially when working near the edges.
Also, scrolling the timeline backwards is awkward when the music is playing, as it brings the play line closer to the end of visible timeline which causes the whole thing to jump forward, negating your progress. I think a zoomed-out preview box would be helpful with highlights marking what's currently visible (like graphics editors often have). I did see you can move around in the song in the player controls but it doesn't show the blocks.
Keyboard shortcuts would be very helpful, particular for fine-tuning block positioning. Perhaps even you could have a key to mark positions during playback for later use in aligning blocks? In fact, in general it would be helpful if you could align blocks to one another, or to the beat.
As a non-musician, I would find it useful if you could "play back" the chord track, for comparison with the song.
Very nice. You know one feature I would love to see are strumming patterns. It's nice to see the chords but it's tough for an amateur to identify the strumming patterns.
Worked great on the first song I tried. Thereafter it crashed my browser several times (FF 31). Would be awesome if you could mix in/out with the actual song a MIDI track of the chords themselves, just to verify that they are correct.
1) Allow me to open links in a new tab. Without this, I'll never use your site.
2) The back button is there for a reason and I like to use it. Again, without this, I'll never use your site.
3) Search for '"billy preston" circles' (without the single quotes). From the results, choose "D&F - Will It Go Round In Circles, Billy Preston - [Dave and..." -- Nothing happens on the resulting page other than chords are generated. The chords are close to right (IIRC) but, you cannot listen to the song to transcribe the lyrics. Zoom in and out works.
This is really nice. There are a number of songs whose chords I can't find, and this one came up with (at the very least) a starting point for figuring it out. I like how it tracks the beat and shows the waveform, and I especially like having the video play in the bottom right so I can watch as I play.
Very cool. The only nitpick is a copy tweak. Throughout the app the app refers to itself as "us" or "our" ("Working our magic") and then almost immediately after as "me" ("It takes me about 30 seconds.") You should consider unifying the pronouns so that either you're always using first person, or you're always using the royal "we".
Otherwise, this is pretty rad. I can see myself using this to practice some new songs that come out.
Both this and Chordify are really awesome endeavors! However, I find them both to be erratic in accuracy to the same degree. Many times, a major in a simple I-IV-V pattern will turn into a minor, or vice versa, or a simple major will excitedly be read as a major 7th. It must be a huge pain in the ass trying to pluck out these harmonics and to accommodate for all sorts of wacky instruments, so I'll let it slide! Both services are tremendous if only for getting the initial framework for a song and figuring out some of the incorrect chords yourself.
Does YouTab have a "confidence" rating for each chord? I don't know if it'd be the best UX to include that number for each chord (and maybe even alternate chord suggestions), but there are times when I'm simply playing along with the song incorrectly and it takes me a couple amateur minutes to correct the one chord that Chordify got wrong.
I'm pretty impressed with this - I purposely fed it a song I thought would kill it ("Fuzz Universe" By Paul Gilbert) - It did an impressive job of capturing many of the underlying chords, while ignoring the lead lines over the top. I notice that it is not really great at capturing very fast chord changes, an has some trouble with varying time signatures, but great first effort. It would be pretty cool if you could upload your own MP3 to it, and get a result back - that way you could generate the output off a recording of yourself to distribute to bandmates.
Edit: Later, that song did kill it, as the changes got faster/harder.
Also, it doesn't seem to have a complete set of possible chords - one song to check would be "A hard Day's Night" by the Beatles. It has a difficult and distinct first Chord which might be valuable to test against.
Ha! I'm impressed at its attempt at the early parts of Fuzz Universe. I think it can do really well when there's a clear bass note, and the bass is clear as a whistle on that album. When it has the bass note it seems to usually get the character of the chord (maj, min, dim, etc.).
Been having a lot of success with Capo [1] recently - excellent beat and chord detection (though it often overcomplicates simple fifths and sus4s assuming they're much more full voiced than they are); also provides a time/frequency intensity view that you can use to pick out melody lines which it automatically translates into tab.
I tried it with a song that is very familiar to me, "Antonio's Song" by Michael Franks, using the top hit in Videos for this Google search. It is in 4/4 time and the beat doesn't vary at all. It has five different actual chords: Am7, A7, Bm7b5, Dm7 and E7, and the pattern of chord changes is quite conventional in a verse-chorus structure. The algorithm did a so-so job of determining the chords. It rarely noticed that they were seventh chords, instead identifying them as Amin, Bdim, Dmin and E. It appears to rely strongly on the bass part. In one case there was a C# passing tone in the bass between an A7 and a Dm7 chord that was identified as a C#aug chord. I didn't try the editor. I guess this would make it easier than entering all the chords from scratch, but it struck me that there was still a lot of manual work to make it accurate and usable.
A question about your plans: you describe annotating as 'contributing to the community' but your terms of service say that only you, not the community, have a license to my copyright on the annotations. You also say that you may one day charge fees.
There have been cases (notably http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote_licensing_controversy) where users have built a database that a company has then claimed as its own and profited from, to the exclusion of the users. So, the question: are the user-contributed annotations open source and licensed as such? And, if not, why would I contribute annotations to a wiki that I may later no longer be allowed to access?
I couldn't get this to work, after selecting a song it appears to work for ~30 seconds and replies with "This song cannot be analyzed because it is not set as public on YouTube." or "This song cannot be analyzed because it is not set as public on SoundCloud."
Hey, great job on the website! I have one small criticism (in addition to others already listed here). I put in a song that was in the key of B. The most-used chords of this key are B, E, F#, and G#m - as I'm sure you're well aware. However, the songs chords were detected as B, E, F# and Abm. While technically correct, as Abm and G#m are the same chord, the convention is to list Abm as G#m in this case. I believe this is to avoid mixing sharps and flats in the written chords forms. Written chords should either all be in flats or sharps, rarely if ever mixed. Certain keys are listed with sharps, and others with flats. Here are the most common ones:
You're right. The idea is that each note of the scale should fall on a successive line or space on the staff, and the "convention" of having keys be only sharps or flats falls out from that (hm, why? I've never thought about that). So for diatonic chords we spell them with those same notes of the scale as well, of course. Some scales even have double flats or sharps!
Very cool! I love the way it just analyzes the audio. It'll be very useful when trying to figure out how to play obscure songs that don't have tabs available on the web.
Works very nicely even with difficult program material (I listen to a lot of weird electronic stuff), but wit would be nice if it had export-to-MIDI or suchlike.
Great site, awesome project, good stuff. However, I found some kind of a "bug": http://i.imgur.com/elpJSS8.png
At this point, you can't see what "kind" of F the first F is. They clearly are different, however I'm not a musician so I wouldn't know what it should be.
Wow, at a glance, this appears to be the best auto-chord-transcribers I've used. I'm getting much more usable data out of this than others that I've tried.
Do you intend for it to be able to hear altered chords?... #5, b5, etc? It didn't seem to be catching that on a song I submitted, but it got the root and third correct, which is still helpful.
The detection is very sensitive to the harmonic definition of a song more than anything else. On some songs it will do a great job and on other miserably fail. That's why it's also an editor, nothing beats the human ear.
This is really cool. The thing that's obviously missing to me is chord charts to go along with the chord names. Despite the fact that people can look up the chord elsewhere, the tool would be much more useful to novice players (who are probably the majority of likely users) to simply provide those charts.
One idea for a feature: you might want to include the ability to move the chords up or down a few half-tones. Some folks will use various tricks to move their instrument up or down a few notches in order to make the chords easier to play. The tool needs to be able to adjust for that.
This is very very cool. How exactly are you getting the audio from youtube? I'm assuming you somehow pull the audio from youtube in your backend (how?), analyze it, use that analysis to build your display and then sync that with the playing youtube video?
[+] [-] yoodit|11 years ago|reply
I've been hard at work on a project that I would like to share with you. It's called YouTab and its what I believe is a great way to sync lyrics and chords with music. The smart guys I work with use a nifty algorithm to "listen" to the music and in a lot of cases it does a really good job in getting the chords. But since technology has its limits there's an editor application that lets you fix what is wrong.
I am hoping that this will develop into a useful resource for musicians and music lovers and I'd love to hear what you think about it and get ideas as to what you might like to see next.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
[+] [-] jameshush|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euphoria|11 years ago|reply
In terms of presentation and editing, I believe the guys at http://www.soundslice.com/ have a solution that is much better. I would love to see a synthesis of these two technologies, with YouTab producing a first draft of a sheet for SoundSlice based on any video.
[+] [-] pimlottc|11 years ago|reply
A bit of feed back on the editor -
First, in general, it's a little... mysterious? It's not immediately clear exactly what clicking in difference places will do, and it's easy to click the wrong the and have the song jump around or a element shift or something, so it ends up feeling a bit twitchy. One thing that might help is better mouse cursors, like the i-bar for moving the current play position line, or the hand for grabbing-and-repositioning.
I get what's going on with the timeline being split in three horizontal rows, but I still find it kind of confusing, especially when working near the edges.
Also, scrolling the timeline backwards is awkward when the music is playing, as it brings the play line closer to the end of visible timeline which causes the whole thing to jump forward, negating your progress. I think a zoomed-out preview box would be helpful with highlights marking what's currently visible (like graphics editors often have). I did see you can move around in the song in the player controls but it doesn't show the blocks.
Keyboard shortcuts would be very helpful, particular for fine-tuning block positioning. Perhaps even you could have a key to mark positions during playback for later use in aligning blocks? In fact, in general it would be helpful if you could align blocks to one another, or to the beat.
As a non-musician, I would find it useful if you could "play back" the chord track, for comparison with the song.
[+] [-] don_draper|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdturnerphys|11 years ago|reply
One feature that might be nice would be to allow for transposing or denoting that a capo should be used.
[+] [-] raverbashing|11 years ago|reply
However, it seems to have "gone crazy" with this song (which is hard) https://www.youtab.me/music/gkE29Y2PPdd/one-without/withered...
But this one it got very well (it's easy) https://www.youtab.me/music/zGvQx6E4KO4/ruth-laredo/mozart-r... I don't remember all the details but it is pretty close to the original
[+] [-] glynjackson|11 years ago|reply
I tried a few songs. It was not clear you could make the screen larger but once I did I just loved the way it counts the beats.
The second song I tried did not work. It stated the song could not be analysed because it was not public, although it was in the search results.
The last song: https://www.youtab.me/search/arctic-monkeys-mar it did not do so well on, but I guess this is where the community comes in.
[+] [-] elsigh|11 years ago|reply
But... it doesn't seem to play, which is kind of a bummer.. Maybe the server is being swamped?
https://www.youtab.me/music/XnWT_wslaBc/lindsey-simon/its-a-...
[+] [-] hammock|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darren884|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamnemecek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fredsanford|11 years ago|reply
2) The back button is there for a reason and I like to use it. Again, without this, I'll never use your site.
3) Search for '"billy preston" circles' (without the single quotes). From the results, choose "D&F - Will It Go Round In Circles, Billy Preston - [Dave and..." -- Nothing happens on the resulting page other than chords are generated. The chords are close to right (IIRC) but, you cannot listen to the song to transcribe the lyrics. Zoom in and out works.
[+] [-] Jemaclus|11 years ago|reply
Very cool. The only nitpick is a copy tweak. Throughout the app the app refers to itself as "us" or "our" ("Working our magic") and then almost immediately after as "me" ("It takes me about 30 seconds.") You should consider unifying the pronouns so that either you're always using first person, or you're always using the royal "we".
Otherwise, this is pretty rad. I can see myself using this to practice some new songs that come out.
[+] [-] Hytosys|11 years ago|reply
Does YouTab have a "confidence" rating for each chord? I don't know if it'd be the best UX to include that number for each chord (and maybe even alternate chord suggestions), but there are times when I'm simply playing along with the song incorrectly and it takes me a couple amateur minutes to correct the one chord that Chordify got wrong.
Great stuff, anyway!
[+] [-] abakker|11 years ago|reply
Edit: Later, that song did kill it, as the changes got faster/harder.
Also, it doesn't seem to have a complete set of possible chords - one song to check would be "A hard Day's Night" by the Beatles. It has a difficult and distinct first Chord which might be valuable to test against.
[+] [-] baddox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yen|11 years ago|reply
On the other hand, Cake's "Sad Songs and Waltzes", with a very distinct 3/4 signature, analyzes well.
[+] [-] junhiwo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jameshart|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/capo/
[+] [-] ChrisMac|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flux_w42|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maho|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neonscribe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ganeumann|11 years ago|reply
A question about your plans: you describe annotating as 'contributing to the community' but your terms of service say that only you, not the community, have a license to my copyright on the annotations. You also say that you may one day charge fees.
There have been cases (notably http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote_licensing_controversy) where users have built a database that a company has then claimed as its own and profited from, to the exclusion of the users. So, the question: are the user-contributed annotations open source and licensed as such? And, if not, why would I contribute annotations to a wiki that I may later no longer be allowed to access?
[+] [-] phpnode|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoodit|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subdane|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtheory|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcnape|11 years ago|reply
C - n/a
D - sharps
Eb - flats
E - sharps
F - flats
F# - sharps
G - sharps
Ab - flats
A - sharps
Bb - flats
B - sharps
[+] [-] jberryman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dyeje|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imacomputer2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woutervdb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beefman|11 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTNzykQba3s
has anything to do with Glenn Gould?
https://www.youtab.me/music/loK8Eby47RZ/glenn-gould/goldberg...
[+] [-] yoodit|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjr|11 years ago|reply
Do you intend for it to be able to hear altered chords?... #5, b5, etc? It didn't seem to be catching that on a song I submitted, but it got the root and third correct, which is still helpful.
[+] [-] yoodit|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebbv|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoodit|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcorey|11 years ago|reply