Guitar Apps That Let You Import Your Own Songs (and the Ones That Refuse)

August 27, 2026by OpenFret Team

You have the file. Somebody transcribed the thing you are learning, or you did it yourself in MuseScore at two in the morning, and now it is sitting on your desktop. The obvious next step is to practice against it in something that can hear whether you played it. That step is where most people get stuck.

There are four things a guitar app can do with a file you import: refuse it, display it, upload it to a server, or listen to you play it. Almost everything on the market does one of the first three.

What does your notation program actually export?

Before anything else, find out what you are holding. MusicXML is the interchange format the notation world settled on, and every serious program writes it.

MuseScore: File, then Export, then MusicXML. It offers a compressed .mxl and an uncompressed .musicxml, and both are fine.
Guitar Pro: File, then Export, then MusicXML. Guitar Pro's own .gp file is not MusicXML and most things cannot read it.
Sibelius and Finale: both export MusicXML from the File menu.

If your file is a .gp, .gp5 or .gpx, export it to MusicXML first. If it is a Rocksmith .psarc, nothing outside Rocksmith reads it, and that is worth knowing before you spend an evening on it.

Which guitar apps import a MusicXML file?

Checked in August 2026. Prices and tiers move, so treat this as a starting point rather than a receipt.

Soundslice reads MusicXML and Guitar Pro files, and it is in the free tier rather than behind the paywall. Your slices live in your account on their servers. It draws notation beautifully and syncs to a YouTube video. It does not listen to you play.
Songsterr does not import your files. It is a catalogue with a player, and Plus is a monthly subscription at $9.90 with no yearly or lifetime option.
Yousician does not import a MusicXML guitar part. You play its catalogue, and it listens to you play it.
Rocksmith+ has a charting tool, and Ubisoft's own FAQ answers the question directly: you cannot chart music you have on your computer, for licensing reasons, and anything you do chart is visible to every other subscriber. It is not a private practice tool.
Guitar Pro itself opens MusicXML and plays it back. It is a desktop purchase, and it is an editor, not a teacher, so nothing in it is checking your playing.
Guitar Quest reads MusicXML and listens to you play it. That combination is the unusual part, and the rest of this article is about the details of it.

What does “never uploaded” actually mean?

It is worth being precise, because the phrase gets used loosely. An app that promises never to train on your uploads has still received them. An app that stores your library in your account has a copy, a backup of that copy, and a moderation policy.

The stricter version is that there is no upload path at all: the file is parsed by the browser you dropped it into, and the result is written to that browser's own storage. Nothing is transmitted, so there is nothing to secure, nothing to share, and no question about who is allowed to host your transcription of somebody else's song.

The cost of that strictness is real and you should know it up front. The piece lives on the device that imported it. It does not appear on your phone. Clearing your browser data deletes it. There is no backup, because a backup would be an upload.

What Guitar Quest does with the file

The feature is called Homebrew, and it sits inside the paid game rather than being a free tool, so read this part before you go looking for it.

It reads .musicxml, .xml and .mxl. It checks the file's own contents rather than trusting the extension, so a compressed export somebody saved with the wrong suffix still opens. A compressed .mxl is unzipped in the browser. It charts a six-string guitar and refuses anything else by name rather than guessing.

If the export came from a tab program, it already carries the string and fret for every note, and those are used. If it came from a notation program and carries only pitches, the string and fret are worked out for you: it searches for the fingering that moves your hand the least and never puts two notes of a chord on the same string. Any transpose instruction in the file is applied, so what you practice is the pitches the part actually sounds.

A file it cannot chart honestly is refused whole and stored nowhere. The refusal names the measure and the beat it stopped on, so you can go and look. Half an import is worse than no import.

After that it behaves like the rest of the game: a metronome, a count-in, a tempo you can pull down, a playhead, and a verdict on each note as it goes past. Read the piece as tab, as engraved notation, or on the note highway. Nothing you play there is scored or saved, deliberately, because it is your file against a note count nobody reviewed. Ten scores ship with it, so there is something to play before you import anything. Guitar Quest includes it. The game is $30 once, and the free demo covers the rest of it if you want to hear the note detection first.

What none of these will do

Save yourself an evening. Nothing in this list reads a Rocksmith .psarc or a CDLC file. Nothing here turns an mp3 into a chart accurate enough to be graded against, whatever the marketing says about AI transcription. And nothing will make a bad transcription good: if the file is wrong, you will practice the wrong thing very efficiently.

If the thing you actually want is to learn a specific song rather than to practice a file, there is a better method than charting it, and it starts with your ears.

Which guitar app should you use to import your songs?

If you want to read your score and hear it played back, Soundslice does that well and the import is free. If you want to edit, Guitar Pro. If you want something to check whether the notes you just played were the ones on the page, the list gets very short, and Guitar Quest is on it. It runs in the browser, so the fastest way to find out whether the detection works with your setup is the demo.

Importing your own songs FAQ

Can you import MusicXML into a guitar app?

Some of them. Soundslice reads MusicXML and Guitar Pro files in its free tier, Guitar Pro opens MusicXML and plays it back, and Guitar Quest's Homebrew reads .musicxml, .xml and .mxl in the browser and then listens while you play the piece. Songsterr, Yousician and Rocksmith+ do not take a file you bring. Checked in August 2026.

How do I export MusicXML from MuseScore?

File, then Export, then MusicXML. Take the compressed .mxl if you are emailing it and the plain .musicxml if you want to open it in a text editor when something goes wrong. Guitar Pro exports from the same menu, and its own .gp file is not MusicXML, which is why almost nothing else will open one.

Which guitar apps do not upload your files?

Guitar Quest's Homebrew has no upload path at all: the file is parsed by the browser you dropped it into and the resulting chart is stored on that device, so there is nothing to share and no library to moderate. The trade is that the piece lives on that one device and clearing your browser data clears it. Soundslice stores your scores in your account on their servers, which is a different set of trade-offs rather than a worse one.