How to organize items in categories – smartChord

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

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.

smartChord categorization concept overview showing how items like songs or exercises are tagged with categories such as Decade, Genre and Mood and then filtered in the Table of Contents

The idea in one picture — tag items, then filter by the tags.

Prefer a quick video? smartChord has a short tour of categorization on YouTube: Categorize items in smartChord.

2 The Table of Contents

Every tool in smartChord that stores items — Songbook, Exercise Plans, Setlists, Fretboard Trainer quizzes and so on — has its own Table of Contents. 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.

smartChord songbook table of contents showing a flat unorganized list of songs and the organize menu with edit, hide, remove, assign and change-filter options

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 — 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s
Genre — Acoustic, Alternative Rock, Blues, Boogie, Classical…
Mood — for the feel of a song
Occasion — for the situation the item is used in
Popularity — for a rough audience rating
Rating — your personal rating

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.

smartChord Edit categories screen with top list of categories Decade, Genre, Mood, Occasion, Popularity, Rating and bottom list of Genre entries Acoustic, Alternative Rock, Blues, Boogie

Edit categories — manage categories on top, their entries below.

Tip: You do not have to use all six 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.

smartChord songbook in multi-select mode with all songs by the artist Johnossi checked and ready for a bulk category assignment

All songs by one artist selected in one go.

Organize menu opened on a multi-selection showing options Edit categories, Hide categories, Remove categories, Assign categories, Change filter and Filter on

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.

Assign categories dialog with a single empty Decade row and a plus button to add another category

1. Start with an empty Decade row.

Assign categories dialog with Decade set to 2000s and a second empty Genre row added below

2. Decade=2000s, added an empty Genre row.

Genre entry picker with checkboxes for Select all, Acoustic, Alternative Rock (checked), Blues, Boogie, Children, Christian, Christmas, Classical, Comedy and Commercial

3. Pick one or more Genre values.

Assign categories dialog fully filled with Decade 2000s and Genre Alternative Rock ready to be assigned

4. Ready to tap Assign.

After the assignment the table of contents 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.

Songbook table of contents after assignment showing Decade 2020s and Genre Alternative Rock beneath each song title

Each song now carries its Decade and Genre tag.

6 Showing and Hiding Categories

Once items are tagged, the Table of Contents 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.

Songbook with Decade, Genre and Rating shown beneath every song title giving a dense but informative list

Categories shown — richer, but takes more space.

Organize menu opened over a categorized song list with the Hide categories option highlighted

Pick Hide categories to collapse the view.

Songbook with categories hidden showing only the plain song titles for a compact overview

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. Each category in the bar can be set, cleared with its x button, or negated with the ! button to exclude that value.

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.

Active filter bar with Decade 2010s and Genre Alternative Rock combined with the OR toggle and the filtered song list below

Filter on: Decade 2010s OR Genre Alternative Rock.

Organize menu with the Filter off option highlighted to temporarily disable the active filter without losing its configuration

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.

Songbook with several songs selected in preparation for removing a category from all of them at once

Select the items to clean up.

Organize menu opened on a multi-selection with the Remove categories option highlighted

Open Remove categories.

Remove categories dialog with checkboxes for Decade, Rating and Genre letting the user pick which category values should be dropped

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 Table of Contents 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 Table of Contents 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 Table of Contents 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.