my recent reads..

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters; From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima
Power Sources and Supplies: World Class Designs
Red Storm Rising
Locked On
Analog Circuits Cookbook
The Teeth Of The Tiger
Sharpe's Gold
Without Remorse
Practical Oscillator Handbook
Red Rabbit

Sunday, July 05, 2009

jTab - Guitar Chord and Tab Notation for the Web

Guitar tab (notation) is all over the internet, but it is usually in either a fixed/non-interactive form, or painstaking ASCII format.

I've always wanted a better way, and two things I've looked at recently inspired me to think it might be possible: Dmitry Baranovskiy's fantastic work on the Raphaël SVG library, and Alex Gorbatchev's syntaxhighlighter.

So now I can introduce the result of my latest weekend project:

jTab - newly minted and ready to rock and roll!

See the project home page at http://jtab.tardate.com for more examples and information about how you can use it too. jTab is open source, with the master source code repository on github .

What does it do?

jTab is a javascript-based library that allows you to easily render arbitrary guitar chord and tabulature (tab) notation on the web. It handles implicit and automatic rendering of any page elements given the special class name 'jtab'. It can also be scripted for more sophisticated or interactive effects.

Bottom line: jTab turns this..

<div class="jtab">Bm $3 4 4h5p3h4 5 $2 3 5 7 7h8p7 5/7 | A $4 7 9 $3 7 6 $5 9 $4 7h9 7 $5 9\7 5/7 | </div>

..into this:


Grab it, use it, help me improve it, or just let me what you think...

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