How to open a Guitar Pro file on Android

By machado001 · 18 September 2026

Open your tab file with Tabline

Why nothing happens when you tap it

A Guitar Pro file is not a document, an image or audio. It is a score: a structured description of every note, its string and fret, its duration, the tuning, the tempo and the instrument. Android ships handlers for PDFs, photos and MP3s. It ships nothing that understands a score, so a .gp5 in your Downloads folder is a file the system can only offer to share.

The three ways one reaches your phone

• A download. Tab sites and forums hand you the file directly; it lands in Downloads.
• A message. A bandmate sends it over WhatsApp, Telegram or email as an attachment.
• Your own cloud. You wrote it on a computer and it is sitting in Drive or Dropbox.

All three end the same way: a file you cannot read on the device you carry.

Opening it

1. Install a tab player that reads the format. Tabline opens Guitar Pro 3 through Guitar Pro 8 (.gp, .gpx, .gp5, .gp4, .gp3) as well as MusicXML and .mxl.
2. Find the file — in Downloads, in the chat it arrived in, or in Files.
3. Tap it. If Android offers a chooser, pick Tabline. If nothing happens, use the share or Open with menu and pick Tabline from there.
4. The score opens as standard notation above tablature. Press play to hear it.

What you should see

A real page of music: beams, rests, ties, bends and slides drawn properly, with the tab staff underneath showing string and fret. If a score has several instruments, you pick which track to read — the guitar part, the bass, the drums.

If it still will not open

Two things are usually going on. Either the file is not what its name says — a .gp5 that is really a zip of images, or a text tab saved with the wrong extension — or it is a format from a different program entirely. There is a separate guide for that: when a Guitar Pro file will not open.