1 Overview
Every musician who uses smartChord for a while ends up with a lot of saved items — songs in
the songbook, exercises, setlists, drum patterns, fretboard quizzes, custom chords and more. As
the list grows, finding the right item at the right moment becomes the real challenge. The
Organize feature turns that growing pile into a searchable, filterable library.
Organization in smartChord is built around categories: you tag each item with
values like Decade, Genre, Mood or Rating, and then filter,
sort or search by those tags. The same mechanism works for songs, exercises, setlists and every
other kind of saved content — learn it once, use it everywhere.
Predefined categories — Decade, Genre, Mood, Occasion, Popularity, Rating
Fully customizable — add, rename or delete categories and entries
Bulk assignment — tag many items at once
Powerful filter — combine categories with AND / OR, negate them
Find the gaps — Not assigned and No category reveal what is still untagged
Sort, search, favorites — classic tools on top of your tags
Recycle bin — a safety net for deleted items
For the official feature description, see
Save and Organize on
smartchord.de.
The idea in one picture — tag items, then filter by the tags.
2 The Library
Every tool in smartChord that stores items — Songbook, Exercise Plans, Setlists, Fretboard
Trainer quizzes and so on — has its own Library. That is the place
where all organization happens: you select items here, you assign categories here, and you filter
and search here.
Without any categories the table is just a long flat list. The screenshot below shows a songbook
with a dozen tracks — nothing is grouped, nothing is filtered, you scroll until you find
what you want. That is exactly what we are about to fix.
A flat, unorganized songbook — and the Organize menu that will change that.
3 Create and Edit Categories
A category is a label type (like Genre) and its entries
are the possible values for that label (Acoustic, Blues, Rock…).
smartChord ships with a useful default set so you can start tagging right away.
3.1 The predefined categories
- Decade: 1920s to 2020s, for the era a song comes from
- Difficulty: a five-star scale for how hard the item is to play
- Genre: Acoustic, Alternative Rock, Blues, Boogie, Classical and about 45 more
- Mood: Happy, Sad, Angry, Relaxed, Excited, Romantic, Melancholy, Motivating, Thoughtful, Nostalgic
- Occasion: Background, Birthday, Campfire, Ceremony, Chill, Christmas, Church, Dance, Exercise, Funeral, Meditation, Party, Wedding
- Popularity: a five-star scale for a rough audience rating
- Rating: a five-star scale for your personal rating
- Status: how far you got with the item, from ◯ Not started over
🌱 Started, 🔨 Basic, 👍 Solid and ✅ Mastered to
⭐ Stage ready, plus ❌ Abandoned
Tip: Status is the one category that changes over time. Combined with the
filter it turns your library into a practice plan: show everything that is 🌱 Started but
not yet ✅ Mastered and you know exactly what to work on today.
3.2 Customizing categories and entries
Open Edit categories from the Organize menu. The top half of the screen manages
the categories themselves, the bottom half the entries of the currently selected category. Use the
+ button to add, the trash icon to delete, long-press to rename — and
confirm with the checkmark when you are done.
Edit categories — manage categories on top, their entries below.
Tip: You do not have to use all eight predefined categories. Most users start with
just Genre and Rating and add more only when a real need shows up — a
category you never fill in is just visual noise.
4 Selecting Items to Organize
Categorizing items one by one is tedious. smartChord lets you select many items at once
and assign categories to all of them in a single step. Enter multi-select mode, tick the items you
want — or use Select all — and then open the Organize menu.
All songs by one artist selected in one go.
Open the Organize menu and pick Assign categories.
Tip: The filter you will build in step 7 makes the opposite trick easy, too:
filter first (e.g. “all songs without Genre”), then Select all — and you only have
to touch the items that still need tagging.
5 Assigning Categories
The Assign categories dialog lets you tag all selected items in one step. You can
pick a value for one category, for several, or add a brand-new category on the
fly with the + button. Existing tags on those items stay untouched —
smartChord only adds or updates the categories you actually set here.
5.1 The flow, step by step
- Open the dialog — the first category (e.g. Decade) is already there, empty.
- Pick a value from its dropdown, e.g. 2000s.
- Tap + to add another category (e.g. Genre) if you want.
- Pick one or several values from its list — multi-value entries are supported.
- Tap Assign. All selected items are now tagged.
1. Start with an empty Decade row.
2. Decade=2000s, added an empty Genre row.
3. Pick one or more Genre values.
After the assignment the Library shows the new tags directly under each item title, so
you can verify the result at a glance.
Note: If you reopen the Assign categories dialog on already-tagged items
and deselect every entry of one category, smartChord removes that
category from the selected items on assign. Leaving a category out of the dialog entirely, on the
other hand, keeps its existing values untouched — only the categories you actually edit are
written back.
Each song now carries its Decade and Genre tag.
6 Showing and Hiding Categories
Once items are tagged, the Library shows the category values in a small line beneath
each title. That is great for scanning — you instantly see decade, genre and rating next to
the song name — but it also takes vertical space.
Use Hide categories from the Organize menu to collapse the list back to a
compact, name-only view whenever you want a denser overview; Show categories
brings the information back.
Categories shown — richer, but takes more space.
Pick Hide categories to collapse the view.
Compact view — titles only.
7 Filtering by Categories
This is where organization really pays off. Turn on the filter and smartChord shows only the items
that match the categories you pick. “All 2010s alternative rock songs I rated four stars or
higher” — one tap and they are on screen.
7.1 Turning the filter on
Choose Filter on from the Organize menu. A filter bar appears above the list.
Use the + button at the end of the bar to add a category to the filter. Each
category in the bar can then be set through its value list, cleared with its x
button, or negated with the ! button to exclude the selected values.
The same filter is also available as a dialog through Change filter in the
Organize menu, which is handy when the bar gets crowded. Both offer exactly the same options.
7.2 Combining categories with AND / OR
When the filter holds two or more categories, a small AND / OR toggle shows up on
the right edge of the bar. AND requires all conditions to match, OR keeps items
that match any of them, the classic boolean logic you would expect.
7.3 ‘Not assigned’: items without a value for one category
Sometimes the useful question is not which value an item has, but whether it has been
categorized at all. Every category in the filter therefore offers an extra entry at the top of its
value list: Not assigned.
Selecting Not assigned shows only the items that have no value set for
that category. That is the quickest way to track down what you have not tagged yet, for
example all songs without a Genre, while songs that do carry a genre stay out of the way.
Not assigned behaves like any other value, so everything you already know keeps
working. Switch on ! for that category and you get the opposite: only the items
that do have a value for it. You can also combine it with other categories through
AND / OR, for instance “no Rating yet, but already tagged with Genre Blues”.
Note: Select all in the value list deliberately leaves
Not assigned out. Ticking every value including Not assigned would match
your whole library instead of just the items that carry a value, so Select all selects the
real category entries only. If you want Not assigned, tick it yourself.
Tip: Use Not assigned right after importing songs or set lists:
filter for the items that still miss a category, tap Select all in the list, and assign
the missing tags to all of them in one step (see step 4 and 5).
7.4 ‘No category’: items without any category at all
Not assigned answers the question for one specific category. To find the items
that carry no category whatsoever, add the special entry No
category instead: tap the + button of the filter bar and pick it from the
list of categories.
No category is a category without values, so it shows up in the bar with just its
name, the ! button and the x button. Switched on it lists every
item that has never been tagged. Combined with ! it does the reverse and shows
only the items that carry at least one category.
Tip: No category is the perfect starting point for a clean-up session of
a library that has grown over the years: it shows exactly the items your filters could never find,
because they were never tagged.
Note: Not assigned and No category exist for
filtering only. They are not offered in the Assign categories dialog,
because “no assignment” is not something you can assign to an item. To untag items, use
Remove categories as described in step 8.
Every category filter starts with Not assigned.
No category lists the items that were never tagged.
Filter on: Decade 2010s OR Genre Alternative Rock.
Filter off hides the bar without losing its setup.
Note: Filter off only disables the filter, it does not
clear it. Switch it back on and your last query is right there — perfect for quickly jumping
between a filtered and the full view.
8 Removing Categories
Tags are not forever. If you reorganize your library or change your tagging scheme you can drop
individual category values from one or many items at a time — without deleting the items
themselves.
8.1 The flow
- Select the items you want to clean up.
- Open the Organize menu and choose Remove categories.
- Tick the categories whose values should be removed — e.g. Rating.
- Tap OK. Everything else stays as it was.
Select the items to clean up.
Pick which category values to drop.
Tip: Removing a category value from items is very different from deleting the
category itself in Edit categories. Removing just untags the selected items; the category
and all other items keep their values.
9 Beyond Categories
Categories are the heart of Organize, but the Library has a few more tools that work
hand in hand with them.
9.1 Sort
Every item carries automatic timestamps, so you can sort by Name,
Creation date, Last access or Favorites first.
Items named in the “Artist – Song” convention can also be sorted by the part behind
the dash — handy for browsing by song title while keeping the artist in the name.
9.2 Search
The Library offers a name search and a full-text search
over names, chords, lyrics and metadata. Both support wildcards (? for a single
character, * for many) and boolean operators (AND, OR, parentheses) — and they
stack on top of an active category filter.
9.3 Favorites
Tap the star next to an item to mark it as a favorite. Sorting by Favorites first pushes
them to the top, and the favorite state can be combined with filters and searches just like any
other criterion.
9.4 Recycle bin
Deleted an item by mistake? It is not gone yet. The Recycle bin — reachable
from the Library menu — stores deleted songs, setlists, exercise plans and custom
instruments, lets you search inside them, and offers a one-tap Restore. Permanent deletion
only happens after an extra confirmation.
All of these tools are documented in more detail in
Save and Organize.
