Chord format converter

[JerryK]

In case it helps anyone to convert from 'chords-over' format to 'chords-inline' format, I found this
http://ukegeeks.com/tools/
Apologies if this has been posted before.

[JerryK]

Arlo has built this function into the app now.  I have not tried it yet but it is probably more convenient, at least, than the external web-based system above.
Well done Arlo

[arlo]

Thanks!

[pingber]

I can't seem to get this feature working correctly (yet).

[JerryK]

I find that I have to do a little ground-work before it works neatly but after that, it does work pretty well.
I copy lyrics with chords-over from some source, usually from my Ultimate Guitar account.  This does not paste at all well directly into BH (e.g. all the [Return]s are missing) but it needs some editing anyway.  So I open Notepad and paste it there - the [Return]s work as expected here.
Verse, Chorus etc indicators are usually in square brackets and I want them in round brackets, so I do 2 global find/replace for that.  Then I check that the chords line up with the start of the words or syllables, throughout the song.  There are usually some out of place, sometimes many.  For a split word (syllable), I add a hyphen and align the chord with the right-side of that -  my preference.
For a solo section I leave a blank line, as if there were lyrics, but fill it with spaces to the length of the line of chords above. This seems to work best.
Copy everything, paste into BH.  If there are any square brackets left, the first use of "[C]" will remove them.  Second use will move chords into lyrics.  You can then remove any blank lines and do any other prettying-up.  E.g. I like (verse) and (chorus) etc to be Gray, so they are very clearly performance information, not part of the song, along with hints like (STOP) etc.  It helps me.
It works well.

[arlo]

Thanks for adding these tips. Losing line breaks when pasting shouldn't happen, but can be hard to troubleshoot ... please open a help ticket if you want to do that. Adding a line full of spaces after a line of just chords also shouldn't be necessary ... you could try skipping that step and see if it still works.

[Mr. K. Ross "Kim" Gardner]

RE: Importing lyrics.
Interestingly, when I stay out of the Ultimate app and just use the website, I have no problems going right into BH.

RE: Chord Bracket button
In lyrics edit window. This bracket tool is a powerful yet simple tool to get rid of square brackets that Ultimate loves to put around headings such as [Verse], [Chorus] and [Bridge], ... kudos for this useful enhancement.

On second iteration, as stated above, it puts the chords inline. However, for those of us who did not adopt inline chords early, is there any way to get bracketed chords for our "line-above" unbracketed chords. Presently, it appears that we cannot hide chords in our lyrics unless they were originally bracketed. This is a lot of work to go back and bracket thousands of chords.

[arlo]

The same ChordPro Tools button that strips out unwanted square brackets can also put them in automatically around chords-over-lyrics. It triggers the first function if square brackets are present and the second function if they are not.

[Mr. K. Ross "Kim" Gardner]

REVISED POST

Interesting thing happened, ... I went into edit mode right from a set list song array and when I used the insert square brackets function, it inserted italics square bracket characters Before and after the now inserted chord instead of non-italics open and closed square bracket characters. I have edited this post because I originally reported that it inserted forward slash characters instead of square brackets. Rather than editing the lyric text from set list view, edit pop-up, ... if I go back to the lowest level root song list and do the automatic chord conversion there, then the inserted square bracket symbols are NOT italicized.

I guess the thing I dislike about this automatic insertion function is that it can and does put the newly bracketed chord right in the middle of a word to get the position as close as possible to the original text. It%u2019s not a big deal but makes revisions of that lyric text quite confusing to the eye.

[arlo]

I'm guessing you had some italics in your lyrics, perhaps at the very start, that the app picked up and applied to the bracket characters that it inserted. I'm guessing further that you tried this with different songs on the two different edit locations, and that explains the different results? Anyway, if you want to follow up on that, please submit a help ticket.

Maintaining a chord position in the middle of a word is a feature, because some people deliberately place their chords there to indicate which syllable of the word the chord change falls on. If you always want chords to be aligned with the beginnings of words, you can edit this before or after the conversion, but it would probably be quicker to do it before the conversion while the chords are still on their own line.

[MasonJames]

Hello,

New user of BH here. Have used Ult Guitar and Tabs app forever. I've also had to reformat when copy and pasting from ultimate guitar to bh. A HUGE help to maybe implement to BH Song Edit to have a button that says [] = BOLD; which would take away anything in brackets and bold the text. Ultimate guitar mainly brackets text like Verse, Chorus, etc.

Another thing to add- if you click Personal Edit in Ult and copy from there, you will have a better time to simply CTRL + A than CTRL + C.

I wish there was a simple way to go from Ultimate Guitar to BH. It has taken me a LONG time transferring every lyric and chord over song by song.

[arlo]

A HUGE help to maybe implement to BH Song Edit to have a button that says [] = BOLD

You can click the ChordPro Tools button ("[C]" icon above the Lyrics field) to remove the square brackets that Ultimate Guitar puts around headings, and then optionally click it again to convert from manually positioned chords to ChordPro chord positioning, which is easier to edit and more reliable when transposing.

A button that changes bracketed text to bold text seems too specific, but you can pretty easily add bold to your headings if you want, after removing the brackets.

I wish there was a simple way to go from Ultimate Guitar to BH

Ultimate Guitar has no reason to make it easy to copy their content into another app, and their licensing agreements might require them to take some steps to make it difficult.

[MasonJames]

Appreciate the reply and all you do!

Totally have and can bold everything myself. Just was thinking is all, sorry.

I hope to make some videos on Bandhelper in the future. There's good resources out there and id love to help others who may have the same things as i do

[JerryK]

One more hint, in case anyone finds it useful.
I use http://ukegeeks.com/tools/ to convert from chords-over to ChordPro in-line chords with the square brackets.  It's not always perfect (and you have to remove any square brackets first or convert them to round ones) but it works for me.

[JimR]

I was using Songbook before switching to Bandhelper (to start using backingtracks as well) and I can recommend SongBook (for Windows PC) for editing lyrics as it has keyboard shortcuts for the functions you use all the time when editing/writing lyrics.

You have CTRL-SHIFT-1 to insert chords in brackets and CTRL-SHIFT-9 to convert from chords over lyrics to Chord Pro format, which makes it fast and easy to go from lyrics copied from Ultimate Guitar to Chord Pro format in BH.

/Jim