Extract text from PTB files
To convert your PTB file to another format, you need Power Tab Editor or other Audio software.
To convert other file formats to the "Musical Score / Accounting Backup" file type, you need software like Power Tab Editor or a similar tool.
The .ptb extension serves two distinct but widespread purposes, often causing confusion for users attempting to access their data.
Most commonly, a .ptb file is a digital guitar tablature created by Power Tab Editor, a legacy Windows authoring tool for guitar and bass scores. While these files contain rich musical notation, the original software is outdated and no longer actively developed, making the files difficult to open on modern operating systems like macOS or Windows 11. Users typically need to convert these tablatures into PDF for printing, MIDI for audio playback, or MusicXML to migrate the score into modern software like Guitar Pro or TuxGuitar. Without conversion, musicians are locked into an obsolete ecosystem.
Alternatively, a .ptb file may be a backup archive generated by Sage 50 (formerly Peachtree Accounting). In this context, the file is a compressed container (often compatible with ZIP) holding sensitive financial records. The main challenge here is version compatibility; a backup created in an older version of Sage often cannot be restored directly into a newer version without intermediate conversion steps. Users often need to convert or extract these archives to verify contents or migrate financial data to Excel or CSV formats via the software's export functions.
Convert.Guru analyzes your PTB file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted PDF, ZIP, JPG, PRNX, PTD, BIN, HDX, XLSX, TAB, SAV, SDOCX, CRDOWNLOAD and MPP files.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our PTB converter.