A desktop guitar tab player. Drop in a Guitar Pro file (GP3, GP4, GP5, GPX) and you're playing — no account, no ads, no install-a-launcher, no "upgrade to premium" wall.

Why this exists

We all got tired of Songsterr. Features that used to be free ended up behind a paywall, including things that run entirely client-side, and the experience kept getting worse while there wasn't a real alternative to switch to. So I built one.

TabEngine is free, and it's staying that way — no paywalled updates, no premium tier, ever. It's licensed under GPLv3 specifically so nobody can fork it, slap a price tag on it, and ship it as a closed-source product. If anyone improves it, that improvement stays free for everyone too.

What it does

• Opens GP3 / GP4 / GP5 / GPX files and renders synced tablature, powered by alphaTab — with a one-click toggle to show standard notation above the tab
• Real mixer — per-track volume, mute, solo
• Practice tools: loop sections (drag on the score, or [ / ] on the keyboard), metronome, count-in, tempo shifting, and a speed trainer that raises the tempo a notch after every loop pass
• Jump to any bar or section marker, zoom the score, go fullscreen — and press ? anytime for the shortcut cheat sheet
• Export to MIDI, WAV audio, or Guitar Pro (.gp), or print the sheet
• Works fully offline once you have a file, and reopens where you left off — last song, panels, volume, speed, zoom all restored
• No local file? Search and pull tabs straight from Songsterr without leaving the app — filter by instrument, including copyright-restricted songs via a built-in fallback downloader
• Playlists with drag-to-reorder, auto-advance, repeat and shuffle — plus a sortable, searchable library that shows each song's real title and artist and can scan a folder of your existing tabs

Screenshots

Good to know

• This is an early project — functional day-to-day, but still rough around the edges. Expect some bugs.
• Songsterr browsing will break. TabEngine talks to Songsterr's site directly, and they change things on their end without warning. When that happens, browsing/fetching will stop working until I patch it — it's outside my control, but I'll fix it as fast as I can.
• Copyright-restricted tabs load a bit differently, but still work. Songsterr blocks some songs from being fetched the normal way. For those, TabEngine falls back to an in-app downloader/converter automatically — just hit "Load via Downloader" instead of "Load in Player." No manual steps needed anymore. That converter is adapted from Metaphysics0/songsterr-downloader — credit to that project for the original conversion logic.
• TabEngine isn't affiliated with, endorsed by, or in any way connected to Songsterr. It just talks to their public site to fetch tabs, same as your browser would.

Found a bug or something feels broken? Open an issue. Want to fix it yourself? PRs are very welcome.

Installation notes

Prebuilt binaries (Windows, macOS, Linux) are attached to each release, with a SHA256SUMS.txt. They're standalone: no installer, just download and run. Heads up: they're unsigned — I don't pay for a Windows code-signing certificate or an Apple developer account ($99/year), so your OS will flag the app as coming from an unverified developer. Don't worry, that's expected, not a red flag. Here's how to get past it:

• Windows (_x64.exe) — a portable exe, run it from anywhere. SmartScreen will show "Windows protected your PC." Click More info → Run anyway. Needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime, which Windows 10 and 11 already include.
• macOS (_universal.app.zip) — runs on Apple Silicon and Intel. Unzip it and move TabEngine.app wherever you like (e.g. Applications). Gatekeeper will block it as from an unidentified developer; clear the quarantine flag once:

  xattr -cr /Applications/TabEngine.app

• Linux (.AppImage) — no signing required. Just mark it executable and run it:

  chmod +x TabEngine_*_amd64.AppImage

  Requires glibc ≥ 2.39 (Ubuntu 24.04+, Fedora 40+, or any rolling-release distro). On older distros, build from source instead.

Building from source

npm install        # installs deps, also copies alphaTab's runtime assets into public/
npm run tauri dev   # starts the real app: Vite + the Tauri window

That's it — you're up and running. Use this route until the GitHub binaries are fixed.

A few other scripts, in case you need them:

npm run dev    # just the Vite dev server, no Tauri window — useful for quick UI iteration
npm run build  # type-checks then builds for production
npm run check  # svelte-check, run this before committing any .svelte changes
npm run sync-songsterr  # pulls the Songsterr-tab converter source from its upstream repo — only needed if you're touching that code

How it's built

• Frontend — Svelte 4 + TypeScript, with alphaTab doing the heavy lifting for rendering and audio playback.
• Backend — Rust via Tauri 2. All filesystem access (reading/saving/scanning tabs) and the Songsterr network calls happen here, not in the webview.

Tauri keeps the app small — no Electron/Chromium bundled in, just your OS's native webview.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 Scrimas. Licensed under the GNU GPL, version 3 or (at your option) any later version (GPL-3.0-or-later) — free forever, and any derivative work has to stay free too. When the FSF publishes a GPLv4, TabEngine can be used under it with no change here.