ChordPro Buddy - The Chordpro Song Editor for the Mac
What is it good for?
ChordPro Buddy is a simple, but powerful song editor and viewer. It allows musicians of many kinds to create, edit and view their songs, lyrics and lead sheets. It allows to transpose, change chords, view and change chord shapes and create beautiful formatted printouts or PDF.
How does it work?
CPB uses plain text files with the very simple “chordpro” syntax to store the lyrics and chords. This syntax uses square brackets [ ], to mark chords and curly brackets { }, to mark commands and formatting tags. CPB has short keys for many of them, so you can edit really fast and concentrate on the song, not on the tool, you work with. While you edit lyrics or chords of a song, you can see the results immediately with the unique synchronized split view.
CPB has a layout pane, where you can use sliders and textfields to set the values of sizes, colors and spacings as well, as fonts for the different parts of a song. With the zoom slider you can zoom up and down the whole song in a second.
All usual chord notations
With the new version of CPB you can switch the chord notation between western, latin and german notation. As an example you can have chord C, D, E chords as DO REM MI in latin chord notation.
One click transposing
You can transpose the chords up and down with only one click of your mouse or even a shortcut on the keyboard. The transpose feature works of course also with all different chord notations.
Import from songs from other sources
Now CPB allows you to import Lyrics and chords from other sources. Simply copy and paste songs from word, pages or PDF’s, or get them from the many webpages on the internet. This works fine, as long as the chords of the source are well positioned above the lyrics.
Display chords as symbols or diagrams
With the new version of CPB now you can show chords as diagrams. This is a long awaited function not only for beginners. You can choose either to show chord charts for all chords above the lyrics, or display every used unique chord once at the top of the song. If you click on a chord chart, you can switch the used chord shape and you can mark your favorite chord shapes, to get them sorted, as you need it.
If a chord is missed you can create it in the chord database editor.
Create beautiful printouts and PDF
To get a nice printout you first format your song with the sliders in the layout pane. When all looks well, you click on print and then use the zoomslider in the detailed printpreview, to adjust the pages as you like. From here you also can create PDF versions of your song.
Practicing and Live usage
With CPB you are not limited to printouts and PDF’s. It is also a powerful tool for practicing and live performances. So you can set a playtime for each song and then let CPB scroll the song automatically through the screen. So you can choose a readable zoom level and let CPB do the scrolling for you. You can start/stop/rewind with simple or double hit on the space bar, use a programmable USB footswitch or you can use a MIDI device. There is a simple MIDI learn function in the preferences for that. There is also a fullscreen mode with his own colorset for better performance in dark on stage situations.
Work together, share and synchronize
Because CPB works like every normal file oriented OS-X application, you can open and edit files in a synchronized folder ( e.g. Dropbox, iCloud drive... ). So you can share and synchronize your songs between your Mac and your mobile devices.
