Formatting chords with special characters

[ChrisMikolaj]

Hey Arlo

I just thought about the chords formatting on all of the songs, I've entered into BandHelper. Usually I would enter chords like this [F#m] or [Bbm]

But when I transpose the chords up and down, the # and b are replaced by special characters to be like [F♯m] or [B♭m]


As in my opinion the special characters stand out a bit more than the letters in the standard font, is it somehow possible to exchange all those values in all of the songs somehow? My current way would be to go through all of the songs, transpose up and down, so it's the same values but corrected to the proper characters.

Also, when entering the chords, maybe there could be some kind of chord detection, that exchanges the "F#m" to "F♯m" automatically already, so the up and down transpose is not necessary at all.

If other users wouldn't want that, maybe it could also be an option in the settings if the chord symbols would be replaced or not?

I'm not sure what the proper process flow would be for that, but I'd appreciate if you/we could have a think about that - if that's even something, that would improve the usage at all.

Many thanks for your thoughts about it

[arlo]

I don't think I would want to change your content automatically. It would be more appropriate to add a button that converts these symbols for the current song, like the ChordPro Tools button. I can put that on my wish list, however, that would take up screen space in the formatting toolbar where that is already at a premium. I like your idea of transposing up and then down again to let the transpose function do this conversion for you. That only takes two clicks and doesn't require adding any new buttons.

When entering songs, you can enter these symbols from the symbol toolbar above the on-screen keyboard in the mobile apps. In the website there's nothing like that, but you could save these symbols in a note somewhere to copy/paste from, or learn how to type them on your keyboard from a Unicode number. But just typing the simple # and b characters and then using your transpose trick is probably faster than either of those options, too.

[ChrisMikolaj]

Thanks for your thoughts on that! Makes absolute sense and maybe there could be such a button to change that on demand in the future.

For now I will go ahead and transpose up and down, but do you think there is a quick way of converting ALL the current songs? I mean for the future it is an easy quick "workaround", but for all the existing songs it might be a bit tedious

Thanks a lot!

[arlo]

There is no way to do this automatically for all songs. Even if we had a search and replace that worked across songs (a somewhat common request), that wouldn't work here because you wouldn't want to change all the letter b characters to a flat symbol. The search function would have to incorporate chord recognition into it. I think the danger of messing up all your songs with that combined with the low necessity of changing these symbols makes it an unattractive endeavor.

[ChrisMikolaj]

Oh, yes makes sense. Thanks a lot!