guitar project started
Couldn’t wait, so I wrote the beginnings of the project yesterday.
So far, you can create a user, login, name the chords you know (simple chords only – for now, this is for beginners), find songs with those chords, or songs with 1 2 or 3 extra chords you don’t yet know.
If you log in, you can add songs. I am hoping that people will find this useful, as I can’t begin to measure the relative difficulties of each song until I have a reasonable amount of data.
I’ve set up a project for it on my issue tracker – if you want to see ‘x’ feature, or you spot ‘y’ bug, please report them.
I hope you find this useful.
I’m debating with myself about whether to release the code for this – I want to share, but I also don’t want someone taking my code and building a huge money-printing site with it and leaving me in the cold (and Monaghan gets cold this time of year). Maybe I’ll release code for “old” versions – like if I’m on version 1.3, I’ll release 1.1 for other people to take.
i think that is a great idea for a project! very exciting. i would put all the songs on the same website and not link to other sites but i assume that’s not a simple thing to do…
anyway i think that’s very helpful for beginners, and i say don’t give the code just yet. maybe you can give the code for different classes of the site and not as one whole project.
the sites good, i don’t think that you should release the code in case someone steals them! have you thought of copyrighting the idea? i talked to a lot of my guitar playing friends about it and they reckon that its a good idea, might be a chance for you to make some money!
I agree with the comment above, that you should eventually make your own database of songs, and get rid of the external links. Also i think that you should give some sort of recognition to the people who tab the songs, maybe a link to that user?
to make money from it, I think I’d need to make it popular first. I don’t think I’d charge anything for it, but I may be able to make something from it by linking to Amazon or Apple for each song in case the reader wants to buy the song.
on copyrighting the idea – I really dislike the idea of copyright and IP (intellectual property). To me, it is simply wrong to have an idea, tell people the idea, then say “you can’t do that”. That’s kinda where the code thing comes in. I don’t mind people copying me, as I think it’s inevitable anyway, but there’s no point simply handing everything to people before you get a bit of a chance to use the idea yourself.
I don’t think I will be adding tab to the site. Maybe in IFrames, but not directly – I’ve read some horror stories of tab sites being ordered by the music industry lawyers (may their black hearts burn for eternity) to stop teaching people how to play their songs.
There’s another reason. I like the unix philosophy, which is “many small tools, each of which does one job well.”. The “tabs” tool has already been written and it should not be rewritten by me. I much prefer to write a new tool which has not already been written, and hook into existing tools when needed.
I’ll be working on the site again today. I’ll post another article when I’m done.
I’ve added a few improvements – not enough to earn a new article, though, so I’ll just comment on it here.
You can edit songs that you uploaded, you can add a link to a video of the song being played. There are a number of architectural improvements as well, but they’re not visible to the end user. list of feature requests.
You could use a CMS the Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) to help with development.
I prefer to write things from scratch (or at least, from a small set of generic libraries). That way there is nothing in there which is there for no reason.
Drupal is quite a large project, and is not suited to what I want to do.
Besides, the foundations of the application are now in place.
I put it under its new domain name today.