First, I'd like to point out that the software developers care about your feedback; they contacted me and let me know that it was already possible to do BOTH of the things I complained about below! So, I'm updating my review to 5 stars, but I leave the old 4 star review below. Keep in mind that you can view tabs (by inserting {sot} and {eot} around them AND you can copy only the chords by CTL-clicking on highlighted parts and selecting "copy chords. Old review: This app makes it easy to keep all your music in one useful place and share it with your music playing friends. Out of your vocal range? Just transpose up or down. Why only 4 stars? A couple things; It's just terrible with tabs (it's not really meant for tabs, I know) but this could be fairly easily solved if they could just make them "justify" right and left. Also, the chord bank could be a lot bigger; I have to enter lots of chords, and then if you transpose, you have to re-enter the transposed version of those chords. Finally, there should be a way to paste the chord progression of one verse over the next; it's very difficult with the chordpro structure, but when you're playing with a group of people who haven't played the song before, you have to decide between reading the chords of the first verse or the words of subsequesnt verses. It ends up taking quite a bit of dedication. Again, it takes a little more dedication than I wish it did. That said, it's one of my favorites and I use it constantly.

This SongBook app is another amazing gift of the digital revolution! Before SongBook, had song books and sheet music all over the place and I never felt organized. This app lets me organize songs easily. One of my favorite joys in life is having friends and neighbors over to sing. It’s live karaoke when the lyrics and chords are projected on the TV via airplay and Apple TV. People play guitars, drum and sing along. So fun! I recently had my iPad with this app on a vacation cruise. Everyone on the ship became friends when we all sang songs together, thanks to this app. I also enjoy writing songs, and SongBook lets me easily write down ideas and alternate ideas (the hashtag is great for hiding lyrics that I am still playing with). I also love that I can attach backing tracks or original songs for rehearsing. This app has done more to improve my musical abilities than just about anything else. (Friends I hadn’t played guitar with in a year were amazed at how much I had improved). SongBook lets me focus on playing, and not on fumbling with papers. I have not tried other lyric and chord apps, and hear that some are also good. SongBook works so well, I have never had the desire to look elsewhere. I use this app with the Firefly page turner pedal, and it works without a hitch. I have both the iOS app and the app for my Mac and sync files via DropBox. It’s all beautifully seamless. Thank You, LinkeSoft!

This amazing app does everything. I can create lyric sheets with custom placement of chords; set the pace for the song along with pauses for intro/outro/solo; for print the sheets out along with chord diagrams; transpose keys on the fly; create set lists for gigs. I use it on my iPad and have had no glitches. It may take a bit of time to get used to the coding used for creating a song sheet, but the structure is very straightforward once you get the hang of it. I have one criticism, which is that if I need to make changes within the app on the fly (time, lyrics, etc.) and save them during the session, the changes won’t be there next time - I’ll need to add the changes on my laptop and then upload to Songbook via iTunes. I’m used to it now, but maybe someone has a workaround. The good thing is that for that session at least you can play with the changes.

SongBook struggles with PDF files. It can display a small PDF with a few pages but larger PDF files may not work at all. There is no ability to assign a music file to a pdf which makes practicing a little difficult if you like to play along. There is also no feature to convert a pdf to a chord pro file (this could be accomplished with “pdftotext -layout”). ChordPro files are handled pretty well but how to achieve two columns is not very clear (keep each line under 36 characters). It is also difficult to control fonts and I’ve never achieved it successfully. A minor issue but it would be nice if right clicking on a song in a playlist included the “reveal in finder” option as it does when viewing from categories. I very much like that the program is available across multiple platforms and that I can sync my songs between them by located the library in a cloud folder. Sometimes the IOS version cannot find the song file though and it has to be re-attached. Be sure to check before heading out to a gig or it’s an unpleasant surprise! Overall I like the program but there is room for improvement.