Archive | Guitar

More Songbook Control Backups

If you’ve put many hours into your songs, then it’s totally on YOU to maintain adequate backups of your SongbookPro Database.

User: Well, I run Sync, so that’s my backup.

Syncing or Backing up to a single file on Dropbox/Google Drive is about as minimum a backup as you can get. If you mess things up, and then sync, well, that’s not much of a backup.

On Backups:

In the IT world, there is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, where there’s (at least) 3 copies of data on at least two different media and at least 1 is offsite (i.e. the Cloud).

Case in point:

I accidentally deleted one of my songs, which is easy to do in SongbookPro. Since I keep multiple copies of my Songbook Pro .SBP file, I was able to find/restore that old song from a previous backup. Since my songs are in ChordPro text format, my SongbookPro database is small, and easy to backup to email on a regular basis. Otherwise, I could save to a storage device and provide a unique name for each database file.

On Version Control: One of the very cool things about Ultimate Guitar is that when you edit a (Chords) song, it keeps previous versions of that song, which you can revert back to.SongbookPro, on the other hand, supports Sync and Backups, but it doesn’t support Version Control (not that I would expect it at this price). I make a poor man’s version control system by keeping multiple backups of my .SBP database.

Conclusion:

At an absolute minimum you should at the very least least Sync or (preferably) make a Backup of your .SBP database.In my case, I have multiple onsite/offsite backups, and occasionally export my entire database as zipped .CHO and .PDF files in case SongbookPro goes south on us. I’ve put FAR too many hours into my songs to lose them as a result of clumsy fingers, failed devices or even abandonware.

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Details Matter – SBP Support

User: <application> doesn’t work anymore. What’s wrong?

I’ve seen this quality of request on several technical forums over the years. Please, please, please, provide a reasonable level of detail such as:

  • What platform you’re working on, iOS, Android, Windows or even SBP Manager.
  • What steps can someone take to try and reproduce your problem. Every click counts.
  • Details such as PDF files or text files or Word documents.
  • Word documents typically use proportional fonts and are messy to import.
  • Sync can have significant problems, especially with folders and setlists. Again, please provide details.
  • How have you configured Sync and/or backup?
  • Are you using multiple devices?
  • How are you importing?
  • Where did you buy the app and are you using the same credentials?
  • Did you read the manual?
  • Keep it clear and concise.

I could go on, but ONE LINER support requests are of little to no help in problem resolution. If you end up providing more information later, please edit/update the original request, not just buried somewhere in the comments. Also, if you’ve solved the issue, please let the community how it was solved.

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SongbookPro Killer Features

My use case:

I volunteer at a local seniors center and run a weekly guitar drop-in session for the ~10 attendees. I’ll display songs on an overhead projector at 1920×1080 resolution (landscape mode), and they can play/sing along. If no one can lead the song, I’ll play the MP3 via Bluetooth to my amp.

Interestingly, most attendees are better guitar players than me. I just got caught up in the technology.

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Backup/Restore the SBP Database

Purpose:

To test the backup and restore functionality of SongbookPro by clearing the database and restoring it to another device.

Assumption:

When I backup up a .SBP database, it should include all songs, related metadata, Sets and Folders. When I restore that database, the ‘contents of the destination’ should match the source 100%.

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Testing ‘Sync’ on SBP

Purpose:

To test the synchronization functionality of SongbookPro.

Setup:

Configure Window 10 workstation running SongbookPro as the ‘source’ for songs, Sets and Folders, and an Android phone as the ‘destination’.

We’ll be testing adding/removing songs, folders, sets and songs within and see how these changes are replicated to the destination device.

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Converting UG to SBP

tl;dr – If you haven’t performed major edits on your Ultimate Guitar chords library of songs, you may be better off just re-importing songs from scratch using the SongbookPro import tool.

If you have a lot of songs on Ultimate Guitar that you’ve edited and wish to keep, feel free to read on.

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Ultimate Guitar to ChordPro

I’ve got almost 500 songs in my favourites in Ultimate Guitar, and across several playlists.

The issue: Ultimate Guitar has continued multiple technical issues on various platforms, making it unreliable for use in a live scenario.

The challenge: How to I ensure songs are available to view FULL screen at any time.

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Tablet Based Sheet Music

Introduction

Back in the day, I used to use paper based sheet music to play guitar, however I’ve since moved onto electronic devices to save and display my sheet music. Here’s my sleuthing to date on formats, devices and apps. In the case of the organization I work with, we had over 500 pages of sheet music, each person with variations of those page. We called it the ‘Sherpa collection’, because you needed a sherpa guide to carry the 4 books worth.

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Guitar update for 2023

It turns out I have an issue with my fretting hand. . . my left one. I have what’s called a limited ‘supinate range of motion’, in that I can’t rotate my palm so that it’s completely face up. I’m off by almost 45 degrees. This is pretty well a show stopper to being able to play barre chords.

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