There Can Be Only One
Songbook (SB) is not the only game in town. There are several ChordPro implementations available. However, after some research there appears to be only one contender that is available across all major platforms: Songbook Pro (SBP). Cross-platform access is a critical feature. It is much easier and much more comfortable to manage and edit song files on a desktop/laptop computer and then have them immediately available on a tablet or phone.
The two applications are remarkably similar, but after a review of features it is my humble opinion that Songbook is a better choice. One important difference is that SB can use plain text files directly whereas SBP imports text files into its own proprietary file format. After importing, the only way to edit the file in SBP is to use the separate Editor/File Manager utility. The editor in SB is built into the app itself. While SB can also convert the text file to a proprietary format, it is not necessary. Leaving the song file in text means it can be edited with a simple text editor, like Windows Notepad, or more advanced text editors which have editing features not available in the Songbook editor. That noted, the SB editor has some exclusive and extremely useful features such as stripping leading and trailing spaces from lines or a section of text and deleting extra blank lines.
Another feature in SB that is not available in SBP is the ability to connect an MP3 file to a song. Both SB and SBP can link a URL (webpage or local file), but SBP can only do one link per song file. SB connects the MP3 internally and can link multiple webpages per song file using a standard URL. This feature is very handy for providing links to the original song, an example cover version, and a tutorial for the song from YouTube or other music source in the same file.
While it appears that SBP has implemented more of the ChordPro formatting, meta-data, and environment directives than SB, the additional directives are, for me, non-essential. Some missing directives would be useful in SB, such as printing lyrics in columns or forcing page breaks, these features are not missed if the intent is to display lyrics on a tablet or computer screen only. Printing to paper or PDF is secondary (and used rarely). That noted, it would be nice if the SB developers added a few more of the v5 and v6 directives such as “comment-italic” and “comment-box”, and more meta-data directives, for cataloging and reference.
Finally, in my humble opinion, SB’s overall user interface is cleaner and does not clutter the lyrics section with action buttons like SBP. I personally recommend it, but I welcome other opinions, below.
A final note: While the new Chordii (ChordPro for v6 confusingly renamed along with the demo app) was mentioned previously and is quite interesting, it was not included in this comparative review because it is not fully cross-platform and not ready for commercial use. However, the code is open source and available at GitHub for those interested.
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