index.md

layout	excerpt
default	Read, write and render music scores, Guitar Pro tabs and MIDI files.

PhpTabs is a PHP library for reading, writing and rendering tabs and MIDI files.

It provides direct methods to read a song name, get a list of instruments or whatever be your needs.

Phptabs is built on the top of a music stack that lets you create or modify your songs.

• Features
• Manual
• Supported formats
• Requirements
• Contribution and Support
• License

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Features

• Read, convert and write GuitarPro/MIDI files
• Traverse and CRUD metadata and data
• Export data to JSON, XML, YAML and other formats
• Import data from PHP arrays, JSON & serialized strings
• Web-rendering in VexTab notation
• Web-rendering as an ASCII tablature
• Calculate durations in seconds

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Manual

• Getting started

• Basics

  • Read a file
  • Save to a file
  • Export
  • Import
  • Render
  • Architecture
  • Traversing

• Music-Object-Model overview

  • Song
    • Track

• Some use-cases examples:

  • Read and update song metadata (Name, author)

  • Render a track as a VexTab string

  • Render a track as an ASCII tablature

  • Calculate durations in seconds

  • Read measures for a particular track

  • Read notes for a particular measure

  • Create a tab from scratch (An empty song)

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Supported formats

PhpTabs currently supports the following file formats:

• GuitarPro 3 (.gp3)
• GuitarPro 4 (.gp4)
• GuitarPro 5 (.gp5)
• MIDI files (.mid, .midi)

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Requirements

Support for PHP 7.2+ and 8.0

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Contribution and Support

If you have any questions, please [open an issue]({{ site.github_repository_url }}/issues).

You want to write another parser, to fix a bug? Please open [a pull request]({{ site.github_repository_url }}).

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License

PhpTabs is licensed under [LGPL2.1+]({{ site.github_repository_url }}/blob/master/LICENSE).

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