SongBook

Being a composer surely implies keeping tabs on all your creations, especially if you plan on reviewing work in the future. In this regard, SongBook wants to help you organize all of your songs, with the possibility to include lyrics, chords, and tabs, all in a well-organized environment.

The visual design may seem rather simplistic, but this is only to allow individuals of all levels of experience to quickly get the hang of things. A side panel lets you easily navigate through songs, and playlist, while chords, and lyrics are viewed, or edited in the rest of the space. There’s also a preset song so you can study the creation of lyrics and chords.

First of all, adding songs has nothing to do with actual audio files on your computer. However, you can Chord Pro (PRO, CHORDPRO, CHOPRO), TAB, CRD, and TXT files, which contain a formatting style supported by this application. However, simply adding a song only requires you to specify title, and subtitle.

Songs can be organized in categories, with a larger variety of options allowing you to set up tags, and genres. Moreover, there’s a built-in playlist editor, but it is only used for info purposes, since you can’t actually export a common playlist file from your list.

As far as the chords editor is concerned, there’s a lot of writing involved if you want to get things right. The preview area is split into two tabs, allowing you to either view, or edit.

A plain textpad is put at your disposal so you can write down everything there is to know about your song, including lyrics, and chords. Luckily, the related context menu holds quick commands so you can easily insert chords, comments, definitions, keys, and more.

The view component takes all text in the editor and lets you analyze it in an organized environment. Plain text is shown as lyrics, while special commands used come under different style, with interactive chord links for better visualization, and even hyperlink support to jump to custom web pages.

In conclusion, SongBook is a reliable tool you can use to keep all your musical creations in order. Although there’s no relation with audio files, both the editor, and viewer are neatly configured to allow anyone to adjust to input methods, and read songs in a standard format, without having to open an external viewer.