RSE CONSULTORES

The short review: GP6 is junk. Don't waste your money on it. Period.I guafwfed reading this review about it being an upgrade'; only in the sense that Vista, and Windows 7, were an upgrade to XP. While GP5 has its many many flaws (I thought I was the only one getting a French error message!) it at least somewhat works reasonably enough to be usable to learn a song. Granted, you'd want to be offer a sacrifice up to the deities when selecting multiple screens for looped playback, or just scrolling screens too fast, but, hey, it was possible to use if you remembered the goats. Most the time.GP6's new interface is certainly noticeable: It places more junk to the left, which makes viewing tab on a laptop screen aggravating if you're looking at tab in horizontal mode, as that's now wasted screen real estate.If you're using vertical mode, you've got junk on the top AND bottom. There's no way of turning off these new interface components, even in full screen mode/playback:Where GP5 let you just get rid of all the toolbars, which, obviously, you don't need when you're merely playing a tab, rather than editing one, GP6 keeps the crap on the screen. For the 'soundboard', you either have it on, or it's a useless status bar type thing; no hot key to switch between the two, and it never completely goes away. GP6 continues the tradition of making it impossible to simply have a clean display of the song you're trying to learn. Stylesheets at least give you some control, but you have to manually load it, EVERY TIME. There's no way to specify a default note spacing, or chord option, when opening an existing song. You can set a default for new songs, which tends to be less than useful for people who spend the majority of their time learning exiting songs, rather than using GP to tab new ones out. There's also no way to specify that you don't want to see standard notation by default; you have to specify it for each track, WHEN it will let you. You're allowed to remove standard notation for stringed instruments, but not for keyboards, or, I found, piccolo; furthermore, you can't display tab for non-stringed instruments in GP6, where of course you could in GP5. (Take a song like Iced Earth's 1776 , which has a piccolo part that is perfectly playable on guitar why in the world remove this feature?!)It still remains frustrating to quick change tunings (say, from standard to half-step down, or vice versa) for instruments. It'd be too much to ask for a feature that allows you to simply change all instruments + or [x] notes, apparently. Each instrument needs to be changed, and you need to remember to click the non-obvious interface item: a checkmark, in the middle of the dialog. (I guess apply or ok is sooooo 2009.)Speaking of tuning, I wasn't able to figure out how to change it for keyboards; I'm guessing that the only way is to transpose; considering the number of tabs that have left hand/right hand separately, and multiple keyboards', that gets to be fun really fast.Others have already mentioned the bloat; even very large tabs load in ~3 seconds on my 'studio' laptop, in GP5. In GP6, IF they finish loading, the minimum time tends to be ~5 seconds, up to ~15-30 seconds, in some cases. In a song with many tracks (say, Dream Theater's A Change Of Seasons), clicking the visible' icon on a track can freeze the program; if it doesn't freeze, it seems to take 2-3 seconds for it to change. If your tab's in multi-track' view, it'll often change it to single track view, of the track you've just set to not be visible. And so on; it seems this edition of GP was crafted by people who are neither programmers nor musicians: perhaps they sacked anyone with any clue about interface design and usability, and used the sage advice of a random waste management specialist to craft their new features'. It would certainly explain the feel of the application.About the only decent thing that I've found about GP6 is that it seems to be able to actually loop an arbitrary number of measures consistently (versus the crash behavior in GP5) and the RSE does sound better. Of course, once most people trying to learn a song have the notes down, they tend to just play along with the REAL song, making increased realism less important to people just using GP6 to get their timings down. Frankly, if Arobas had put half as much effort into actually improving GP as they did investing in crappy anti-piracy measures, we'd probably have something that at least improved on GP5, rather than this bloated crapware.As it stands, I'd suggest that, instead of buying GP6, it'd likely behoove folks to just donate to tuxguitar and put in a feature request for whatever format support's missing.Whatever the case, stay far far away from GP6, unless composing and learning music isn't as fulfilling for you as fighting the blind rage and/or uncontrollable urge to throw your computer off a mountain that GP6 tends to instill after mere minutes of use.