Fretride vs TabMaker

Fretride is a guitar practice and songwriting app for iOS and macOS, with a fretboard visualizer, playback engine, tab editor, pattern library, lessons, and practice games. The fretboard displays notes by key and scale degree, plays notes, and shows chord shapes across the neck. Its touch-focused editor handles full songs and techniques including hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends, palm mutes, and triplets. With an audio interface, the app scores timing and selected playing details; analysis runs on-device and microphone audio is not recorded, stored, or transmitted. Lessons and games are included in the free version, which allows up to three saved songs and needs no account. The app includes hand-recorded guitar samples and separate tracks for drums, piano, bass, violin, cello, flute, saxophone, and trumpet. Signed-in Pro users can sync songs, tabs, progressions, patterns, and lesson progress across devices. Pro also adds unlimited saved songs, custom arpeggio and strum patterns, additional guitar tones, and MIDI instrument sound banks. Monthly and yearly subscriptions are billed through Apple, with exact regional prices shown in the app before purchase.

TabMaker is a browser-based tool for creating, organizing and managing tabs for guitar, bass, ukulele and banjo. Its AI can turn microphone-recorded guitar riffs into tabs, or process MP3 and M4A files up to 6 MB in Quick Tabs, Enhanced Tabs or Chords Only modes. A separate Guitar & Bass to MIDI tool converts MP3 recordings into standard MIDI files with detected notes and musical properties. The browser app supports tab and standard notation, and plays tabs with acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass or banjo sounds. Tabs can be exported as PDF or ASCII text, printed in the browser or shared through a viewing link. The free plan costs nothing, requires no registration and stores tabs in browser localStorage; cloud storage is included with paid subscriptions. Monthly subscription costs $3.99 a month, or annual subscription costs $34.99 a year. The iOS app adds cloud saving and exports including PDF, MP3, MIDI and text.