telel6s
Tele-Afflicted
{start_of_rant} So I've finally broken down to transfer my music sheets to a tablet. I have thirty-five+ years of lyric/chord sheets in various binders. Some were even created on "typewriter". For apps I've tried both Open Song and SetList Helper and, on advice of friends, paid for SetList Helper.
At first, I just copied PDFs to the tablet. The problem with that is that many of them are formatted to be on a music stand. For example, I might type out the chorus just once. Or if first verse is also the last verse it gets typed out only once. If that goes to two pages, no problem. But on a tablet where the song document has to be scrolled, that does not always work. Additionally, I have two different sized tablets which use a different location naming system so if I create the link to the PDF on the 7" tablet it doesn't translate to the 10.5" tablet and vice versa.
No problem I tell myself, I'll use the CHORDPRO format. And then I find out it has fewer features than the HTML I first played around with in 1998. Inserting chords in brackets [Em7] within the lyrics works most of the time. Unless I need a chord per beat in which case they are all scrunched up together because multiple spaces within lyrics get changed to just one space.
And then the formatting and environment directives in CHORDPRO (like tags in HTML) are quite limited. And you can't use one embedded within another. Add to that, not all programs have implemented all of the directives. For example, in SetList Helper supports the start_of_chorus/end_of_chorus but not the same directives for verse or bridge.
This means I'm creating bodges (for multiple spaces I'll do ". . . ." or something similar. And creating a new song on the SetList Helper website is easier to start, but then because of inconsistent formatting I have to go back and forth between the tablet and the laptop to get things right.
I know some of my problems are with how SetList Helper has implemented CHORDPRO. But still, I find it to be much more limited than I was expecting which means taking more time to add a new song and having to make compromises in the final result.
Aaaarrrrgggghhhhh.
If anybody knows that a different app has a better, more complete implementation of CHORDPRO I'd be happy to hear about it.
{end_of_rant}
At first, I just copied PDFs to the tablet. The problem with that is that many of them are formatted to be on a music stand. For example, I might type out the chorus just once. Or if first verse is also the last verse it gets typed out only once. If that goes to two pages, no problem. But on a tablet where the song document has to be scrolled, that does not always work. Additionally, I have two different sized tablets which use a different location naming system so if I create the link to the PDF on the 7" tablet it doesn't translate to the 10.5" tablet and vice versa.
No problem I tell myself, I'll use the CHORDPRO format. And then I find out it has fewer features than the HTML I first played around with in 1998. Inserting chords in brackets [Em7] within the lyrics works most of the time. Unless I need a chord per beat in which case they are all scrunched up together because multiple spaces within lyrics get changed to just one space.
And then the formatting and environment directives in CHORDPRO (like tags in HTML) are quite limited. And you can't use one embedded within another. Add to that, not all programs have implemented all of the directives. For example, in SetList Helper supports the start_of_chorus/end_of_chorus but not the same directives for verse or bridge.
This means I'm creating bodges (for multiple spaces I'll do ". . . ." or something similar. And creating a new song on the SetList Helper website is easier to start, but then because of inconsistent formatting I have to go back and forth between the tablet and the laptop to get things right.
I know some of my problems are with how SetList Helper has implemented CHORDPRO. But still, I find it to be much more limited than I was expecting which means taking more time to add a new song and having to make compromises in the final result.
Aaaarrrrgggghhhhh.
If anybody knows that a different app has a better, more complete implementation of CHORDPRO I'd be happy to hear about it.
{end_of_rant}
