Since beta-launching our PDF and image importer a few weeks ago, we’ve been surprised at how many people have tried to upload tab-only music. That is, music that looks like this:

Problem was, if you tried to upload this, you’d get an error: “No noteheads detected.” Our system required that there be standard music notation attached to the tablature.

Given so many people tried uploading this style of music, we’ve made it a priority to handle it. Now, if you upload a PDF or photograph of music like this, it’ll (hopefully) actually work!

But there are several caveats. The biggest caveat is that we currently import all notes as quarter notes, because our machine-learning algorithms don’t yet know how to determine the rhythmic duration of each note. We’re working on that, but we figured we’d launch this early version since something is better than nothing — and note durations are easy to change in our editor.

For more about tab-only support in our PDF/image import, see our new help page.