Songbook Apps

What’s this obsession with ChordPro? Aren’t PDFs much easier for everyone?

The answer is: no, they aren’t.

What PDFs are really good at:

• preserving the appearance of their content.
• being printable.

And that’s it.

ChordPro allows you to do so much more!

• Transpose songs to any key!
• Display chord diagrams where you need them!
• Make individual songs easily findable through tags and full-text search!
• Keep files editable (so that end users can make adjustments according to their personal taste)!
• Be properly displayable on mobile devices, including autoscroll!

Especially if you use a ChordPro app. There are several out there. The most widespread currently are OnSong and Songbook by Linkesoft as well as SongbookPro by Songbook Systems Limited.

• OnSong is only available for iOS (i.e., Apple devices) and only as a rather expensive subscription (currently about €30/year (as of Fall 2025)).
• Songbook is available for iOS, Android, and Windows as an affordable one-time purchase (depending on platform, currently one-time €15-20 (as of Fall 2025))
• SongbookPro is also available for iOS, Android, and Windows. The full version currently costs about €6. Band versions that synchronize songs between different users, however, are significantly more expensive with an annual subscription of about €30/year.

The following explanations refer to Songbook (Linkesoft) due to its widespread use, but the others offer similar functions. (You can find some information about SongbookPro at the very bottom of this page.)

ChordPro usage with Songbook

Songbook is incredibly powerful. We’re only showing the most common use cases here. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the app, feel free to look in the settings to see what else you can do.

Creating & maintaining a song collection

Setting up cloud synchronization

Songbook initially stores all files locally.

If you want, you can automatically synchronize your entire song collection to a cloud folder, e.g., Dropbox, Nextcloud, Google Drive, OneDrive. Then you always have a backup there (which you can also share with others if you like) and you can also use it to use the same song collection on multiple devices (e.g., tablet and phone and computer).

To do this, from the song list, go to the top right under Settings => Select Cloud Sync:

Select the desired provider there (you must already have a user account there!) and log in accordingly.

Then you must confirm that Songbook may access files and folders there.

Then you’ll be prompted to synchronize and you’re done.

Synchronization does not happen automatically!
Whenever you want to synchronize, you must do it manually.
(Menu => Synchronize Dropbox (etc))

Adding ChordPro files

When you download a ChordPro file on a mobile device, you can select Open with Songbook. Then it will be saved by Songbook immediately in the right place.

If that doesn’t work: Menu => Add song => Choose file and then select the saved file.

Otherwise, you can of course also insert it on the computer, e.g., into the cloud folder, and then synchronize.

Creating songs manually

You can also create songs directly in the Songbook app:

Menu => Add song => New song

Then Songbook creates a fresh file and you can enter everything directly there.

Important: Songbook uses the {subtitle:} directive instead of {artist:}! Please replace it with artist!
At least for songs you want to submit to Open Filk Songbook. 🙂

Tip: to insert chords: use Menu => Insert chord at the top right. The first time, this sets the square brackets, but also gives you a list of all chords you’ve already had in this file (so it gets easier and easier). Especially on mobile devices, this makes input much easier.

Using a song collection

Displaying songs

When you click on a song in Songbook, it opens:

Chorus and bridge segments are highlighted with a black bar and chords are positioned above the syllables where they should be played.

Playing songs

Since mobile devices rarely have enough screen to display an entire song at once, you can play songs. There are several ways to do this:

Autoscroll

When you click on the icon at the top right, the text begins to move.

The speed is initially somewhat random. But you get a bar displayed at the bottom where you can specify how long the song should take in total (in minutes). You can adjust this with + and – or by moving the displayed slider left and right. Then click the save icon on the right, then it will be saved directly in the file and next time the tempo should be right for you.

Turning pages via pedal

There are pedals that you can connect to your device and then use to turn pages.

Steve Macdonald has recommendations on his website.

If you want to use something like this, it’s advisable to set Settings => Page turning to 50 or 75 etc.
This tells Songbook by what % you want to advance per pedal press. By default, this is set to 100, which can be super irritating.

Second person

If you have someone sitting next to you, they can also simply push the text forward by swiping on the screen.

Transposing

This is where ChordPro really shows its power!

The song is in a key that doesn’t suit you? Simply press the button at the top right and you can transpose the entire song up or down by semitone with the buttons at the bottom (at the bottom of the screen) while seeing which chords they become:

Have you found a key you like: click on the 3 dots => Save at the bottom right and all chords will be saved in the new key. It can be that easy!

Editing

If you want to edit a file, simply select Menu => Edit at the top right, then you’ll get to the editing view:

Displaying chord diagrams

Two steps are required for this:

Select instrument

In the settings (from the song list Menu => Settings => Instrument) select the instrument you play.

You usually only need to do this once (unless you change instruments).

Display a chord

In the song: simply click on any chord.

Then you’ll see all chord fingering variations stored in Songbook:

If the author of the file used the {define:} directive, its results are also visible here.

Finding songs

List view & categories

Generally, Songbook simply lists your songs alphabetically by title.

Categories

You can organize individual songs into so-called categories. These simply correspond to folders. (If you insert songs not via the app but as a file into the folder structure and create subfolders (only 1 level works), those are the categories.)

By default, you always see the songs of the category you’re currently in. You can use this, for example, to separate “Filk” from “RockPop” or otherwise keep some order.

In the app, you can move songs to other categories by long-pressing them in the list view and then selecting Change category.
Each file always belongs to exactly 1 category (because it’s a folder).

Above the song list, you see the current category and how many files are currently in it. If you click on it, you can jump to another one.

Tags

A song can have any number of tags. These are keywords you can search for.

To do this, click on Menu => Tags from the song list.

Then you get all songs that belong to the last selected tag. If you click on it (top right), you can select another tag and display its songs.

This is super practical for finding follower songs in circles, for example!

All tags contained in any songs within your own song collection are automatically listed. So you don’t have to maintain this manually again centrally, Songbook does it automatically.

Full-text search

Also a super powerful function. You can’t remember what a song is called, but you have at least 1-2 words or a line? Or don’t feel like scrolling through song lists?

From the song list Menu => Search and then just start typing!

You first get all songs that contain what you’re looking for in the title, and then all that have it anywhere at all (even if it’s just in a comment!).
Under certain circumstances, both apply to a song, then you’ll see them twice.

Playlists

Playlists offer another additional, independent way to group songs, even with an order. This is practical, for example, for set lists for a performance, or also for “I’m currently practicing these” scenarios.

Adding a song to a playlist

In the song list, long-press the song => Add to playlist.

If you don’t have any yet or need a new one, you can create one there directly via the + sign at the top right.

Songs are always added to the end of the playlist.

Using playlists

To do this, click on the icon at the top right of the song list.

Then your most recently used playlist will be displayed.

Changing order

To do this, select Menu => Change order from the playlist.

Then you can long-press individual songs to detach them from their position and then move them to any position.

SongbookPro

Easily confused with the Songbook app by Linkesoft is SongbookPro by Songbook Systems Limited. This is also a full-featured song management app that displays ChordPro files, transposes them, can be visually customized, and can integrate a metronome if needed (you can simply tap in the beat on the touchscreen). Autoscroll is also possible here, with an individual scroll speed that can be set for each song, or page turning via foot pedal. If desired, you can also integrate music files as a backing track.

The app enables highlights and notes in songs that can be searched and grouped according to various criteria. In addition to alphabetical list or setlists, searching by tags, including multiple ones, is also possible. However, there are display problems with some characters in the song text, for example typographic apostrophes or ellipsis marks.

Due to its low price and large feature set, SongbookPro is a highly recommendable and intuitively operable Songbook or OnSong alternative.