Songsterr Tab Catalog Metadata Scraper

Index the complete Songsterr song catalog via their public JSON API. Returns structured metadata for every song in the library — artist, instruments, tunings, view stats, and page URL. Metadata-only: no tab bodies or notation payloads are fetched.

What It Does

Songsterr is one of the world's largest interactive guitar tab platforms, with over 600,000 songs spanning every genre and instrument. This actor queries the Songsterr public catalog API and exports a clean, structured dataset covering:

• Song identity: title, artist, Songsterr song ID and artist ID
• Instrument inventory: which instruments (guitar, bass, drums, vocals, etc.) each song has tabs for
• Tuning data: distinct tuning configurations across all tracks, as MIDI note arrays
• Engagement signals: total view counts across all tracks
• Direct links: the Songsterr page URL for each song

Legal note: this actor fetches catalog metadata only. It does not request or store tablature bodies, notation files, or audio — keeping the dataset clean for research and application use.

Use Cases

• Practice app builders — seed a song/instrument database without manual curation
• Music information retrieval (MIR) researchers — instrument coverage and tuning distribution analysis across a large corpus
• Music-ed platforms — verify whether a requested song has tabs before surfacing it to users
• Content enrichment — augment your own music catalog with Songsterr instrument and tuning data

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
queries	array of strings	No	Artist names, song titles, or keywords to search. Leave empty to run a full A-Z catalog sweep.
maxItems	integer	No	Maximum records to return. Leave blank for unlimited (full catalog).

Example — fetch Metallica songs:

{
  "queries": ["metallica"],
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example — full catalog sweep (all songs):

{}

Output

Each record in the dataset represents one song.

Field	Type	Description
song_id	integer	Songsterr numeric song ID
title	string	Song title
artist	string	Artist name
artist_id	integer	Songsterr numeric artist ID
has_chords	boolean	Whether chord charts are available
has_player	boolean	Whether the interactive tab player is available
tracks	string (JSON)	Per-instrument track objects (instrumentId, name, instrument, views, tuning array, difficulty)
track_instruments	string	Comma-separated list of distinct instruments for this song
tuning_set	string (JSON)	Distinct tuning arrays (MIDI note arrays) across all tracks
total_track_views	integer	Sum of view counts across all tracks
songsterr_url	string	Direct URL to the song page on Songsterr
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 timestamp of when this record was collected

Example record:

{
  "song_id": 455118,
  "title": "Master of Puppets",
  "artist": "Metallica",
  "artist_id": 20,
  "has_chords": true,
  "has_player": true,
  "tracks": "[{\"instrumentId\":30,\"instrument\":\"Distortion Guitar\",\"views\":1782112,...}]",
  "track_instruments": "Distortion Guitar, Electric Bass (finger), Drums, Vocals",
  "tuning_set": "[[64,59,55,50,45,40],[43,38,33,28]]",
  "total_track_views": 2485514,
  "songsterr_url": "https://www.songsterr.com/a/wsa/metallica-master-of-puppets-tab-s455118",
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-21T11:00:00.000Z"
}

Discovery Mode

When queries is empty (default), the actor runs a built-in A-Z sweep — 26 parallel query seeds — to collect the full Songsterr catalog. For targeted pulls (a specific artist, genre keyword, or song title), supply one or more search terms in queries.

Performance

• Memory: 256 MB
• Rate limiting: 300 ms between API pages (polite pacing)
• Full catalog sweep: covers ~600k songs across 26 query seeds

Notes

• The Songsterr public catalog API (/api/songs) does not require authentication.
• Tuning arrays are MIDI note numbers (e.g. standard guitar E standard = [64, 59, 55, 50, 45, 40]).
• The actor deduplicates tunings per song so tuning_set lists only distinct configurations.