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Ultimate-Guitar.com, Pro, Official, bug, scam?


mczero
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No doubt many of our Charters have parted with their hard earned $ to gain Ultimate Guitar's "Pro" membership and gain access to their "Official" tabs for purposes of charting CDLC, as did I several years ago. Some months ago I discovered that the "Download" button had disappeared from these "Official" charts. UG now claim that we were never supposed to be able to download "Official" tabs and if we did it was caused by a bug. I tried the nifty Chrome extension UG Downloader, but that leads to an Access denied page for "Official" Tabs now. 

So before I cancel my UG membership, I'm asking, has anyone found a workaround for downloading these "Official" tabs (for which I have already paid )? I don't mind paying, I just like to get what I paid for. 

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I've looked around the internet for a solution to this myself, and I was never able to find anything. The closest I found was that Songster lets you download their tabs if you know where to look, but UG really don't want people downloading their official tabs. An old post on their forums complained about it, for the same reason you and I would, but the staff response was that they think people would just repost the tabs for free in other places, making the Pro sub worthless which, yeah, that probably would happen. 

It sounds like a lot of work, but I've actually charted a handful of songs from UG tabs by just copying them by hand. It's not convenient (and their official tabs often have small errors in them anyway), but it's worked well enough for me.

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Thanks for the response, CrackerJack. 

Yes, I suppose one could reduce the anal pain of a rewrite by downloading the best submitted version and make any improvements by hand from viewing the "Official" version, if any.  I've noticed they mostly don't do these supposedly "Official" versions until they've got a pretty good .gpx submitted by somebody else, which they then make improvements to and post as "Official".  Charting CDLC is a tedious process and I would have thought paying my $ would have allowed me to skip this step but...  sigh.

Songsterr is a good alternative if the tab exists there. I somehow find myself looking for obscure material that hasn't got there yet. UG has snowballed into having a pretty wide range in recent years which is what sucked me in.  gprotab.net is pretty good, mostly for old stuff too.

Btw. It seems like the no download button thing on UG has been applied gradually to different members rather than all at once as others seemed to complain years before it happened to me. It would be interesting to see how other charters have reacted to this problem.  Maybe they give you a year or two before you get the chop.

I'm still hopeful that UG downloader or something like it will upgrade to overcome the problem.

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Update.

Just a bit more info to save you the hassle of trying. I tried loading an Ultimate Guitar "Official" gp5 on Firefox under Arch Linux. No download button. I then tried UG Downloader for Firefox. Result: Same old old Access Denied error. So changing Operating System and browser made no difference.  

So my subscription to UG is looking decidedly fragile.

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  • Solution
On 11/25/2021 at 7:36 AM, JoshGHz said:

My friend wrote a script for me to download them, but they periodically alter the method we were using.

Thanks Josh. Yeah I think the same changes beat UG Downloader too. I think they've renamed or hidden the downloads page somehow.  I'm hoping someone writes a script that will still work. If not I'm killing my subscription next year.

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