Your Guitar Pro file will not open: what is actually wrong
Short answer. Check what the file actually is before blaming the app. Most failures are a text tab or an archive wearing a .gp5 name, a format from a different program (.tg, .ptb), or a download that stopped early — its size is suspiciously small.
Open your tab file with Tabline
1. It is a text tab with the wrong name
ASCII tabs — the dashes-and-numbers kind you copy out of a forum — are plain text. Saved as
song.gp5 they look like a score file and are not one: there is no timing, no tuning and no
instrument in them, only characters. Nothing can play them, because there is nothing to play. Open the
file in a text editor; if you can read it, that is what you have.
2. It is an archive of something else
Newer Guitar Pro files are zip archives, which cuts both ways: people rename zips of PDFs or
images to .gp and the disguise is convincing until a reader looks inside and finds no
score.
3. It is another program's format
.tg is TuxGuitar. .ptb is Power Tab. .sib is Sibelius,
.mscz is MuseScore. None of them are Guitar Pro files, and a Guitar Pro reader will not
open them. The fix is to open the file in the program that wrote it and export MusicXML, which almost
everything can read — see opening MusicXML on Android.
4. The download stopped early
A truncated file has a plausible name and an implausible size. A real score is usually tens of kilobytes; a few hundred bytes means the transfer failed. Download it again, preferably not over a flaky connection.
How to tell quickly
| Symptom | Most likely |
|---|---|
| Opens in a text editor and you can read it | ASCII tab, not a score file |
| A few hundred bytes | Truncated download |
| Renaming to .zip reveals PDFs or images | A disguised archive |
| Extension is .tg, .ptb, .mscz, .sib | Another program's format — export MusicXML |
When Tabline cannot read a file it says which of these it looks like, rather than showing a blank page. If you report it, the report sends the format and the error — never the file itself.
Find out in one tap
Tabline names the format it found and the reason it could not read it, rather than failing silently.
