If you like to sing songs and play along on your guitar, banjo, ukulele, etc. at a campfire, bar, church, etc., the tablet revolution has been a boon. No more binders to carry around! Instant access to lyrics and chords for approximately 1 bazillion songs!

The downside, though, is that the quality of the song transcriptions you find online are of widely varying quality. Additionally, the web pages that contain the transcriptions are chock full-o-ads, and as a rule, the best campfires are found where the internet access is the worst.

The answer to these problems is to curate your own collection of song transcriptions. The best tool I’ve found to do this is LinkSOFT’s cross platform SongBook.

SongBook allows you create and manage files for songs in the simple, plain text based ChordPro file format. It is easy to start with the transcription of a song from one of the online archives, and then correct / customize it within SongBook. Once the song is set up, it is easy to do things like change keys and display chord fingering.

SongBook has versions for both desktop and mobile platforms, and the mobile versions support DropBox for syncing. This makes it easy to utilize the strengths of each. I use the desktop version to create and edit song files, and the mobile versions for performances. That said, if I need to edit a song on the go, those edits get automatically synced thanks to the magic of DropBox.

The app does cost a few bucks. However, I have found it to be a good value. There are new functions being added regularly, and when I have had (rather minor) problems, the developer has been very responsive.

-- Clark Case 06/21/13