Hello everyone,
The song page was completely redesigned, now it conveniently allows you to download or even transfer via USB all styles for a selected song from one place. It also acts as a hub for all song related materials to help you play song styles you just downloaded.
You can check out the new look here: https://styleplayer.io/song-styles/abba/the-winner-takes-it-all
Song pages now include the following:
- BPM, key, and time signatures for a song
- Video reference to the original performance, hosted on Youtube
- Sheet music. Currently we are relying on MuseScore to host the scores, as this is possibly the only site at the moment that allows anyone to browse the copyrighted sheet music for free. It also provides a convenient embedding option that lets us display the scores on our site in full.
- Hooktheory Tabs. If you are not familiar with them, they are breaking a song into sections (Verse, Chorus) and displaying them in a form of some kind of piano roll + chords. Such format was chosen primarily to avoid copyright claims I suspect, but it fits surprisingly well as a companion for the style files, as we also break songs into small sections that consist of chords and melodies.
- AI Generated Chords. Currently relying on Chordify as they allow you embed their chords on other sites, the chord quality is decent enough, and it's free.
- Chord & Lyrics. These are the traditional guitar tabs in ChordPro format containing lyrics and chords. Despite being the most popular format I couldn't find any respectable site that offers embed options to host them on other sites, so for now we went with external links to UltimateGuiltar as the industry leader.
As you noticed all of these materials are not directly hosted on our site and only embedded or linked, this was a deliberate choice to avoid copyright issues, as we cannot host lead sheets and lyrics without a permission (we can chords though, and I have some cool ideas regarding chords for the future). Perhaps one day we grow big enough to strike direct deals with music studios, but until then we need to be working with larger sites who have the contracts in place. Despite being embedded, I think all of these new features are really helpful additions to the site.
All of these materials can be contributed by the community (currently some options are locked to moderators for the initial trial period), so if you want to help you can contribute scores and chords for your favorite styles to help other arranger owners.
Thanks.