We’re thrilled to announce TabToolkit (App Store link), our latest app for musicians. A perfect companion to GuitarToolkit, TabToolkit is a highly advanced tablature player for the iPhone and iPod touch. It’s a great tool for learning new songs and practicing exercises.

If you’re unfamiliar with what a tablature (or tab) file is, it’s a simplified form of music notation that started out for guitar music, but has expanded over the years to enable the creation of complete music compositions. Wikipedia entry for tablature

TabToolkit was a significant technical challenge in a number of ways. By rendering out music notation in realtime and coupling it with synthesized instrument output, we feel like we’re really expanding the capabilities of the platform. We initially planned on launching 1.0 without synthesized audio, but after hearing a prototype implementation work for the first time, we realized we just had to do it.

Creatively, there were plenty of hurdles to overcome as well. We had to create our own font for the music notation display. The combination of Adobe’s licensing options and the lack of good, freely available music notation fonts made creating our own the most compelling option.

A few of the features in TabToolkit:

• Support for the following tab formats: Guitar Pro, Power Tab, text and PDF *
• Audio synthesizer allows you to hear the instrument being played
• View both standard music notation and tablature notation
• Automatically scroll through music with tempo control
• Turn on a metronome with a wide range of sounds
• Select from multiple instrument tracks
• Display a fretboard (guitar or bass) or keyboard that shows finger positions
• Upload tab files directly from your Mac or PC
• Download tabs from the Internet using the built-in web browser
• Portrait and landscape orientations for viewing while docked or on a music stand
• Built-in help, news and feedback support features
• Lefties welcome! Lefty-mode inverts the fretboard to display correct finger positions

* Instrument audio, metronome, auto-playback, music notation and multiple tracks are suppported for Guitar Pro and Power Tab files

Buy it in the App Store or visit the TabToolkit page to learn more.

Tags: TabToolkit