Chords Color

[dotonemanband]

Unexpected change with color chording. I have two Samsung tablets, one 10" and the other 12". I have them setup exactly the same using bandhelper. For some reason, the 10" tablet is not highlighting the chords with the lyrics as it's always done. Just happened. The 12" hasn't changed and the chords are highlighted in yellow which is how I set it up, whereas the 10" is only showing white chords now. I went to settings, appearance, chords color, yellow and even changed to another color but no change with the 10". I've done a side by side comparison with the two tablets and they are exactly the same when looking at the settings/appearance page. I've restarted the tablet, no change. Guess I could go through each song and manually change the colors but with 300+songs that would be very time consuming. Possibly something to do with an update? Suggestions ... tia

[Ahiru]

Probably due to the recent update, from the release notes:

Changed the chord coloring and transposing functions to stop recognizing chords that are placed on the same line as lyrics text and not bracketed. This avoids problems with misidentifying chords. If you want to display chords within lyrics lines, you can put square brackets around them and set Settings > Appearance > Bracketed Chords to Inline.

I have the same challenge, with many songs using inline chords that automatically showed yellow that are now indistinguishable, so I have a lot of editing ahead to get it back to the way it looked.

Arlo, any chance we could have a setting to enable a 'legacy' highlighting method?

[arlo]

Can you both post screen shots showing the problem?

[Ahiru]

(Using an iPad that's been updated and one that hasn't yet...)  As it was displayed before the update and after the update...

[arlo]

I'm working on a solution for the "Intro" and "4x" text in the line of chords above the lyrics, but embedding chords directly into the lyrics as you're doing now is too unreliable and will no longer be supported. You would have to add square brackets around those chords. Besides avoiding errors with misidentified chords, that will also give you the ability to quickly switch between hiding the chords, displaying them inline as you do now or displaying them above the lyrics lines, with different band members able to use different styles.

[pheldal]

It is not just chords in lyrics that behave differently in the last release. In the chord-field I see entire sections that are not interpreted as chords ... and the problem with whitespace added within the chords-field when transposing has reappeared. My bandmates who have not applied the last update don't have these problems.

[arlo]

I was responding to the examples posted by Ahiru. If you post your own examples I can look at those, too.

[Ahiru]

I'm working on a solution for the "Intro" and "4x" text in the line of chords above the lyrics, but embedding chords directly into the lyrics as you're doing now is too unreliable and will no longer be supported. You would have to add square brackets around those chords. Besides avoiding errors with misidentified chords, that will also give you the ability to quickly switch between hiding the chords, displaying them inline as you do now or displaying them above the lyrics lines, with different band members able to use different styles.

I'm not that concerned about the Intro and 4x text since I typically assign explicit colors to things like this as needed (and I presume brackets could be used as well).  (And to be clear, the Intro and 4x text is OK... same red in old and new version.)  I understand the good reasons to shift to requiring brackets for the inline chords; I just wish there was more warning for a change like this since it's going to mean editing & rechecking for most of our songs.  (Fortunately our band doesn't play gigs that often LOL, next up is in 2 weeks.)

[arlo]

To be honest I didn't know anybody was writing songs this way. I most often see people spacing chords manually above lyrics, and the rest of the time see people using ChordPro.

In any case, I recently started noting changes to (or removal of) existing features with an exclamation mark in the release notes, so you can more easily check that for potential issues before installing an update.

[Ahiru]

I'm starting to edit all our songs to add brackets now, but I find that it displays the actual brackets along with the chord names (see image).  is there a way to get it to display just the chords in color (without displaying brackets) as before (and as shown in the tutorial under #6 here: https://www.bandhelper.com/tutorials/adding_lyrics.html)

[arlo]

No, but an option for that is on my wish list and I can try adding that soon.

[Ahiru]

OK, thanks but no hurry since I'll just dig in and change those chord letters to explicit colors... it's actually slightly less typing and clicking than adding brackets around them anyway.

[arlo]

I recommend adding the square brackets instead of manually changing the text color of the chords. If you add the brackets, you will get the following capabilities:

• Transposing
• Hiding the chords or displaying them above the lyrics
• Changing the chords color for all songs with one setting

[Ahiru]

I recommend adding the square brackets...

I agree those are all great reasons, but we don't need those capabilities, it's more important to get it quickly back to the way it looked before, it's faster to change the colors than to add the brackets, and (for now) if the brackets show it would add visual noise and mess with line length / wrapping in a number of places.  I may gradually add the brackets some time in the future.

[Ahiru]

No, but an option for that is on my wish list and I can try adding that soon.

To reiterate, no need to prioritize this (display without brackets) for me since I've now manually colored all the chords (and maybe I'm the only one using inline chords LOL).

But, I want to emphasize how great it is to show the chords inline in a different color (without brackets):
* Twice as compact as showing chords above, so less scrolling and easier to glance and spot what you want.
* Even though it might seem 'jumbled', you find your brain automatically spots the colored chords if that's what you're looking for, or easily ignores them if you're just looking at lyrics, or easily sees the integrated chords+lyrics if referencing both.  Great for the occasional side glance to remember a chord, lyric, or both.

If we were starting from scratch today (rather than 2017), we'd surely go with the bracketed chords and lobby for inline display without brackets. But we just have too much invested in the old inline style.

(We use proportional fonts to get the best use of screen real estate, and place the inline chords where they don't break apart a word, so I don't think the ChordPro conversion tool in the layout editor would work well for our situation.)

All good, still the best app on the planet for acts like us!