Multitrack tablature editor and player
TuxGuitar is a full-featured music composition tool that can be really helpful to musicians, whether they use their computer to produce music or not. It is a professional-grade software that will allow you to create and listen to various tablature formats. All of its offered features and tools can be experienced free-of-charge.
Overwhelming for novice users, but feature-packed
TuxGuitar can look complex at first sight, well at least for music newbies. But the amount of tools available, along with an extensive help section and documentation really encourages you to give it a go. This audio editor and player feature a nicely-designed interface with clear, simple lines that make music composition tasks lighter work.
Besides composing on the tablature, you can also use a virtual guitar fretboard or piano keyboard to make composition even easier. What's more, it also enables you to play the songs you compose, using one of the many instruments included in it. On top of that, it provides import and export support for GP3, GP4, and GP5 file formats.
How do you use TuxGuitar?
As stated, this music companion app provides a clean interface with a layout that is intuitive-designed. However, its entire operation will still be a challenge, especially for beginners. Your attention will surely focus on your on-going composition as it displays an empty music sheet that you must fill in with notes and rhythms. You'll also be able to select the note value you prefer either whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second, or sixty-fourth.
At the same time, it allows you to insert a time signature, set the music tempo, and choose a clef. If you wish to increase or decrease the tone of a certain note, you can possibly do it here. Essentially, all the markings in a regular musical sheet are also accessible in this app. While you are working on your current composition you can listen to it and modify the areas you want to improve. Its built-in player can go through the entire sheet and provide an accurate rendition.
Challenging only at first
In spite of its quite confusing first impression, TuxGuitar truly deserves a chance from all music composers especially for its nicely-designed interface that features many interesting tools, which can greatly help improve your music composition. If you're a beginner user of this app, you should make use of its help section to quickly grasp its whole operation. Once you have familiarized yourself with it, everything will be a piece-of-cake.
Support measure range to loopTranspose notes featureOptionally transpose affected notes when change tuningMove beats left|right supportMore song properties optionsAdd multiple measure supportClean multiple measure supportNumber of pastes supportBetter lilypond pluginBetter fluidsynth pluginNew jack pluginNew community integration pluginNew cocoa integration pluginNew audio unit pluginMany bug fixes
Changes
Support measure range to loopTranspose notes featureOptionally transpose affected notes when change tuningMove beats left|right supportMore song properties optionsAdd multiple measure supportClean multiple measure supportNumber of pastes supportBetter lilypond pluginBetter fluidsynth pluginNew jack pluginNew community integration pluginNew cocoa integration pluginNew audio unit pluginMany bug fixes
User reviews about TuxGuitar
by Anonymous
I would have happily paid a hundred bucks for this as is!.
Many thanks for a great program, generously given free. I am using this as a teaching tool and would have been happy to pay for it and happy to pay even more if it had a few refinements. It has great features for working with and learning tab and notation in real time but unfortunately the printouts are unreadable as the tab font is tiny and can't find a way to change it. Tab symbols could use some refinement also, only suggesting as improvements, the program is immensely helpful as is.
Pros:
Realtime playback allows demonstration of timing changes
Cons:
tab font tiny and unreadable in printouts. Can't find a way to enlarge it.
Also can't find a way to divide the score into phrases for tidier printing More
by Anonymous
Great Program .
Has a lot of features and is helpful for figuring out how different tracks work together in a composition. Easy to generate sheet music and/or tabulature for individual tracks.
Pros:
Fairly intuitive Cons:
Would like to be able to generate audio files from it More