Tab players which have synced audio were pretty rare for a while (Guitar Pro added it only last year). So few years ago, I designed a REAPER script to be able to visualize a Track MIDI items content in a scrolling Guitar Tab viewer. This is how ReaTab Hero, one of my top selling premium script, was born!
The GUI is kinda simple (no shading, no 3D etc), but the big resizable display, the colored notes scheme and the extensive instruments set up possibilities (number of strings, tuning, frets…) made it quite satisfying to use, compared to more traditional thin black and white tab displays.
Yet, it had few frustrating limitations due to how GFX, the native GUI engine for ReaScript works. The scrolling wasn’t very smooth, especially if there were a tons of note. Being able to have smoother display for this script was on my wishlist for years, but this is out of scope of what I could provide with script code.
At last, few months ago, a solution came out, which change the game for this script: GFX2ReaImGui, by cfillion! This allows to render ReaTab Hero in another GUI engine, using ReaImGui extension, so that the scrolling is way smoother than before. The shapes are also more pretty on the eyes thanks to anti-aliasing.
This definitely helps me a lot in my Metal Cover Guitar video series, to learn to play songs in synced with the original audio tracks, and anyone who have ReaTab Hero already, as this come as a free update to the pack. Note that this series encourage me to add new features to ReaTab hero and to the pack as well last year.
Extra smoothness will only be achievable if ReaScripts run at a fixed 60fps, but this is not possible because of REAPER limitations (at least not without extension… which might be the subject of another later post 😋).
I you want to know more about ReaTab Hero usage, I let you check other features of the script on its dedicated page linked below, and follow the update and the related cockos forum thread.
Happy Guitaring 🎸
