Afinar
Afinar and Guitar Pro
Guitar Pro is where tabs get written, edited and transcribed, and it’s the standard for a reason. Afinar doesn’t edit anything. It takes the file you made or downloaded and turns it into a play-along that follows the actual record, with a recorder beside it.
What Guitar Pro does, and Afinar doesn’t.
It writes music. Notation, tab, editing, transcription, arrangement, export. Afinar has no editor at all and never will.
It plays your arrangement back. 200 soundbanks, 80 effects and amp models, and a pedalboard for shaping how the program sounds when it plays your score to you.
It has practice tools of its own. Speed trainer, looping, solo and mute, metronome, countdown, and an imported audio track with its waveform under the score.
If your work is transcribing and arranging, Guitar Pro is the tool and Afinar isn’t competing for that job.
What Afinar does with the same file.
It arrives already following. Drop a .gp file into Afinar, pick the part you play, and it’s rendered to clean pages that turn themselves in time with the actual recording. Bar for bar, repeats jumping back on time, nothing to set up.
Your instrument goes through the amp, not the program’s. Guitar Pro’s amp models shape its own playback. Afinar’s shape your live signal, in your headphones, while you play, and they’re captures of real amps rather than modelled ones. Your raw DI is kept, so you can change the rig on a recording afterwards.
It records you. Your playing and the backing together, in sync, filed under the score. That’s the thing neither Guitar Pro nor anything else on these comparison pages does.
It plays the rest of the web too. Tab sites, lesson videos, YouTube, PDFs, sheet music exports. The Guitar Pro file is one thing in a library of everything else you practise from.
| Guitar Pro | Afinar | |
|---|---|---|
| Write and edit tabs | Yes | No |
| Transcribe and arrange | Yes | No |
| Play your arrangement back | Yes, RSE | No, it plays the real recording |
| Follow the actual record, bar for bar | No | Yes |
| Amp models | For its own playback | For your live instrument, captures of real amps |
| Records you playing | No | Yes |
| Tab sites, lessons, YouTube | No | Yes |
| Price | About $75 once | $24.99 once, Pro $14.99/yr |
Using both.
Write or download the file in Guitar Pro. Drop it into Afinar. Play it against the record, and keep the recording.
Free for 14 days.