Importing songs in TAB format.

[pcmalle]

Hi

I have a number of songs (100+) in TAB format, as downloaded from Ultimate Guitar.
Is there an easyer way to import the songs into BandHelper, than to use copy/paste
into the lyrics/chords fields?

Thanks

/pcmalle

[arlo]

What format are the files saved in? (Tab isn't a file format, that just describes the contents of the text inside your files.)

[pcmalle]

It is like this, where the chords are above the lyrics:


G                       D       G
I thought love was only true in fairy tales
G                 D                G
Meant for someone else but not for me.
C               G
Love was out to get me
C                G
Thats the way it seemed.
C              G              D     
Disappointment haunted all my dreams.

/pcmalle

[arlo]

When you said "tab" I thought you meant "tablature," and that's not tablature. I'd just call that "chords over lyrics."

But how are they saved into files? What is the file extension on the files?

[pcmalle]

At https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/ they call it TABS, but when you download it, it is just plain text files,
with the extension .txt.

/pcmalle

[arlo]

If the documents were ChordPro files instead of plain text, you could batch-import them and BandHelper would create songs from them and move their contents into the Lyrics field.

With plain text files, unfortunately that won't work, leaving you with two options:

1) Zip a folder of .txt files and batch import them on the Repertoire > Documents page. In this case, BandHelper will create a new song for each file, but will simply attach the file to the song. This means the text file's contents will display when you view the song, but to edit the lyrics you'd have to go back and edit the original file and re-upload it.

2) Make a song for each file and manually copy the .txt file contents into the Lyrics field for each song. You could make the songs as a batch if you select your list of files and copy, then paste into Excel, which should make a list of file names that you can then batch-upload onto the Repertoire > Songs page. But if the file names aren't the same as what you want as the displayed song titles (e.g., if you have messy file names like "01 freebird edited 2.txt") it would be easier just to make each song manually and enter clean titles.

[pcmalle]

OK, Thank you.

I found a program to convert the .txt files to ChordPro files (Chordsmith),
but there is still some editing to do with each song, so I guess I will just do it the hard way,
and copy the texts into the lyrics fields.

/pcmalle