The songbook is really feature-rich and can be very individually adapted. There are a lot of widgets to control the songbook. That is why it needs little explanation. The screen is divided into different sections and everything can be hidden except the song. But you can also customize the song to hide parts of it, such as chords or lyrics.

Title

• The ‘Navigation’ menu brings you back or to the home screen
• The History gives you quick access to your latest songs
• The ‘Menu’ provides functionality around the song itself like edit, transpose, …
• The ‘Folder’ menu provides functionality for handling songs:
  • Find songs in the greatest internet song catalogs
  • Save the found songs in the songbook and use it also offline
  • ‘Table of contents’ opens the screen with powerful functionality to manage your songs:
    Search, categorize, import, export, print, share, …

Toolbar

The toolbar at the bottom has three lines of buttons grouping similar tasks. The toolbar itself fades out automatically. It will appear for a while after a click on the song. But you can pin it, so it is always visible.

Hide – show – switch

The lowest row of the toolbar lets you hide or show widgets or let you switch the mode of the songbook.

Use the toggle buttons to show/hide:

• Scroller widgets, which are used to control the scroll feature of the songbook
• Player, which accompanies you while you play. You can switch between different players as only one can be displayed at a time.

The songbook supports the following modes:

• ‘Default‘ is the mode where chords and lyrics are in separate lines
• ‘ChordPro‘ presents the songs in ChordPro style, where the chords are in the same line of the lyrics. This style is more compact but maybe a bit confusing.
• ‘Just chords‘ shows only the chords and the structure of a song. The chords are aligned in columns.
• ‘Lyrics‘ shows only the lyrics and the structure of a song. This is the mode we would recommend if you use the songbook as a singer.

Start – Stop

The middle row of the toolbar contains buttons to control, start and stop the player and scroller.

Enable player and scroller

Using the corresponding toggle buttons, you can decide whether the player or scroller is controlled via the start and stop buttons of this toolbar. If you only want to use the player, deactivate the scroller with the toggle button so that the song doesn’t scroll.

Start/stop the player and scroller

The start button becomes a stop button after the start and vice versa. ‘Back to start returns the player to the beginning and the scroller to the beginning of the lyrics. Whether the player or scroller is involved depends on the toggle buttons described above.

Show – hide song content

The upper row of the toolbar contains buttons to control the content of songtext and the format.

To clean up a song, you can hide the parts you are not interested in:

• Comments means every line, which is marked as a comment. Start a line with a ‘#’ and it is regarded as a comment or the chordPro directive for comments
• Lyrics mean every line with text, but no chords
• Chords mean every line with chords
• Tabulature (TAB)

The intelligent line break option breaks belonging lines as a block (TABs or chord and lyrics) so that no horizontal scrolling is necessary (Android 4.4 or newer)

The multi-column layout can present a song in 1, 2, 3 or 4 columns. It is song specific and can differ from song to song (Android 7 or newer).

The information toggle button displays a separate section with information such as song name, time signature, duration, etc.

Scrolling

• The scroll speed can be defined for each song individually. Either manually or automatically calculated by the visible scroll range, the length of a song and its duration
• Scroll delay time in seconds is shown as a count down
• Duration for automatic scrolling is taken from the {duration} directive. The duration is automatically set to the length of an audio file or (YouTube) video if it is associated with a song. Without an explicit set duration, 3:30 is assumed
• Scrolling starts with a delay so that the first lines are longer visible. The delay is active by default. But you can change this default behavior for every song individually
• You can set scroll breaks to pause scrolling for a few seconds. Add a new line with the scroll break directive {x_sccrd_sbr:10}. It stops scrolling for the defined seconds
• Scrolling can be deactivated on start (please see Start – Stop)
• Note: Scrolling needs, that the intelligent line break is active

Information

There is a compact representation of the song information and a representation of the complete set of information. Switch between them with the ‘arrow’ button.

You can click on the information to change it.

If the information view is hidden, the song name is automatically shown in the first line of the song.

Chord gallery

A click on the chord gallery plays the chord if “Sound” is enabled in general “Sound settings”.

A long press shows a menu for the chord. With it, you can get more information about the chord. Or you can change the chord or its voicing for the whole song.

Note: There is an option in the settings that determines the sorting order. Either the chords are sorted by name or by the order of their occurrence.

Songtext view

The song text itself is responsive. Tap on a chord to get a dialog with more information about it. Within this dialog, you can change the chord or its voicing for the whole song. There is an option in the settings to change this behavior. Then it plays the chord.

Tap somewhere else to get the toolbar. You can get the toolbar also with the inconspicuous button (‘….’) at the right bottom of the song text.

Double-tap starts or stops the player and/or scroller.

You can zoom in and out by pinch gesture.

There are a lot of options to customize the song view. Please see the songbook settings:

• Use the color options to beautify your songbook with three different color schemes:
  • Bright
  • Dark
  • Printout
• Define the colors for the text and background of:
  • chorus
  • bridge
  • interlude
  • pre-chorus
  • verse
• Define a different font

Player

There are five possible players:
◾ Audio player
◾ Drum machine player
◾ Metronome
◾ Video player
◾ YouTube player

You can show/hide a player with the ‘Player’ toggle button and switch between them by the ‘Select player’ button in the toolbar. We recommend the option to select the player automatically. Then it shows the player based on the linked player source. Either an audio file, a (YouTube) video id or a drum pattern.

The players are playing even if they are hidden.

Audio Player

• A-B loop to repeat only a part of a song
• Accelerate or slow down the speed at which you’d like to practice a song (Android >= 6.0). It affects the audio play speed as well as the scroll speed
• Option to play the song in a loop
• There is an automatic lookup for audio files if the location has been changed (e.g. after synchronization).

Video Player

You can add a video that is stored on your device to every song. The embedded video player plays the video beneath your song text, so you can keep an eye on both. The video player supports the formats “3gp”, “mkv”, “mp4”, “ts” and “webm”.

• A-B loop to repeat only a part of a song
• Accelerate or slow down the speed at which you’d like to practice a song. It affects the audio play speed as well as the scroll speed
• Option to play the song in a loop

When you add a video to a song where the duration isn’t set, the duration of the song is automatically set to the duration of the video.

Below the video player is a handlebar to customize the size of the video player. There is an option in the songbook settings to hide the handlebar to save space on a small smartphone screen.

YouTube Player

• In every song, you can create a link to a YouTube video
• The embedded YouTube player plays the video in parallel to your songtext
• If you add a video to a song where the duration isn’t set, the duration of the song is automatically updated to the duration of a video
• Below the video player is a handlebar to customize the size of the video player. There is an option in the songbook settings to hide the handlebar to save space on a small smartphone screen
• The directive {x_sccrd_yt:} is used to define the YouTube video by its ID (e.g. {x_sccrd_yt:19JVc76ExkY}).

Drum machine

Integrated drum machine player to play the drum patterns for the musical accompaniment. When playing, it shows the minimized drum pattern view. Tap on it to stop the player.

You can choose between hundreds of shared drum patterns or create your own. The song gives the speed for the drum pattern.

Metronome

The song gives the speed for the metronome or can be entered by BPM dialog with tap tempo functionality. You can also select song-specific time signature from a list of predefined measures.

The player options allow:
◾ Optionally flash
◾ Optionally mute
◾ Optionally vibrate