If you write chords today, you probably push them over the right syllable with the space bar and hope they stay there. On another phone they will not.
What it looks like
[C]Just keep [G]going, don't be [Am]afraid,
the road [F]leads into [C]the dark.
The app draws the chords above the right syllable on its own. You never police the spacing, because there is none.
It is plain text. Open it in a text editor, send it by email, put it on a USB stick. No lock, no proprietary program.
How it differs from a PDF
A PDF is a picture of a page. It looks the same everywhere — and that is also its problem.
| ChordPro | ||
|---|---|---|
| Changing key | redraw the whole page by hand | one tap |
| Larger type | zoom in and scroll sideways | the text reflows |
| Narrow phone screen | unreadable | adapts |
| Fixing one chord | open the original, export again | retype a letter |
| Size | hundreds of kB per song | a few kB |
PDFs still make sense for notation, scanned scores and anything with a fixed visual shape. For lyrics with chords they are dead weight.
Transposition is the real reason
This is the one that matters to anyone accompanying a singer.
When a chord is stored as data rather than as a drawn letter, it can be recalculated. Move the song down two semitones and the whole thing rewrites itself — slash chords and the sharp/flat choice included.
Directives: what else goes in the file
Beyond chords, ChordPro carries information about the song. It goes in curly braces:
{title: Just Keep Going}
{artist: The Band}
{key: C}
{tempo: 96}
{capo: 2}
So after an import the song already knows its title, its artist and its key — nothing to type in by hand.
Sections are marked the same way:
{start_of_chorus}
[F]You'll know the [C]chorus when it lands
{end_of_chorus}
One thing to watch
{capo: 2} directive says where your capo is. On its own it does not
rewrite the chords in the text — that is what transposition does. They are two
different things and easy to confuse.How to get your songs into it
Nothing needs retyping:
- Got
.cho,.chopro,.crdor.profiles? Import them straight away, hundreds at a time in a single ZIP. - Got text files from your computer? They load with encoding detection, so accented characters survive.
- Got a SongBook Pro backup? Eutepio reads it and converts the chord notation itself — details on the switching page.
- Got a song only on paper? Photograph it and the text is read from the picture.
Getting out is just as easy: export your library back to ChordPro or to PDF whenever you want. That is the best thing about the format — nobody uses it to tie you down.