For years, I’ve lugged various binders from gig to gig that stored my music. Most of that has been in the form of single-sided sheets of chord charts, and as I have been actively gigging for the past 12 years, you can imagine how thick my main gig book has gotten. Well recently, I was at a funeral service where the musician used her iPad to display her music. After the service, I went to talk to her and she told me she was using an app called “forScore.” It’s a brilliant little app that is essentially a PDF viewer. It has gotten some rave reviews, and I _almost_ pulled the trigger on it. BUT, most of my stuff was in chord charts.
So I looked for guitar-related score apps, and came across some really cool ones. There were several in the Apps Store, but I couldn’t really choose; that is, until I came across a demo of LinkeSOFT SongBook. While all the apps out there had some great features, SongBook has some key features that got me to spend the measly $5.99:
- All song files are in ChordPro format. Files in this format are text files that contain formatting tags that affect the printed and display appearance. This is also a fairly ubiquitous format for sharing chord charts.
- SongBook also has a built-in web browser that searches for files with .pro, .chopro, and .txt extensions. But not only can it find the files, you can import them directly into SongBook!
- Because SongBook works on the ChordPro format, transposition is instantaneous, as the app simply parses the chord tags and makes the appropriate pitch changes.
- SongBook will also sync with DropBox (http://www.dropbox.com), which you can create for free for 2GB of space – more than enough to store literally thousands of text files!
- Finally, SongBook has a highly flexible Playlist manager. For instance, I had a bunch of my church songs in ChordPro format on my local drive. I dropped all of them into DropBox, synced SongBook with DropBox, then created a playlist of sacred music. Now when I play at Mass and need a song I wrote, it’s a couple of taps away! So awesome!
Here’s a great demo of SongBook:
Mind you, I’m not making a marketing pitch for the product. But this really has me excited because it means that I don’t have to lug my binder around any longer. Funny thing is that I don’t even use the chord charts any longer for songs I’ve done for years because I simply page through the book, find a song I want to do, and because I’ve memorized the song, I just start playing. I’ve tried to print out lists and go off them for gigs, but that has been tedious because I never do songs in the same order. Plus the damn book is 4-inches thick with songs! But now, I have an iPad that’s less than a 1/2-inch thick. And I won’t printing out pages any longer! So not only am I saving on gig weight, I’m also going green! Too cool!
Now, for sheet music, I think the best app out there is forScore, but I probably won’t get it until I’m back playing inside with the piano. Since I’m playing guitar exclusively for the summer, I really don’t need sheets. But hey! $4.99 is pretty cheap!
Guitar Gear 
Great apps and use of the iPad !
No need for the $800 single purpose Freehand MusicPad product anymore.
Though the MusicPad does have a foot switch, allowing “freehand” changing of pages.
Damn! $800?!!!! No thanks. You can actually reduce the size of the font with SongBook and the text will split into column format. No need for page turns.
[…] had grown to about three inches thick. It was pain lugging that thing around. But then recently, I discovered LINKSoft SongBook, a wonderful app that has allowed me to put my binder away, and use my iPad to display charts. […]
Hi, I just wonder how much do you pay for each song?
RIP
Nothing. I download charts directly off the internet at sites like Chordie. The app reads ChordPro format files and imports them directly. It is SO very cool!
Skype has opened up its internet-dependent buyer beta to the world, soon after launching it extensively within the Usa and You.K.
previous this month. Skype for Internet also now can handle Linux and Chromebook for
immediate messaging conversation (no video and voice however, those
need a connect-in installment).
The expansion of your beta adds assistance for a longer list of languages to help
you strengthen that global usability
I was curious if you ever considered changing the structure of
your site? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect
with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or 2 images.
Maybe you could space it out better?
Thanks for the review. I am thinking of this app to get rid of my song binders too but have a quick question. Some of my printed music is very old, obscure, my own work, or I’ve edited to my liking so I don’t want to have to go finding it again online. Can I scan my printed version and upload into the songbook?