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.
Ultimate Guitar Editing and Transposing
In order to make my Ultimate Guitar song collection consistent, I found a song I liked, made a private edit of that song in order to ensure that my song wouldn’t later be taken down, as well as to provide visual consistency.
In order to convert my songs to text based ChordPro format for use with SongbookPro, I faced two major hurdles. They were, how to download my edited songs in a text format as well as the much greater issue (at least in my case) of transposing songs to the original played key.
Downloading ‘Chords’ Songs from UG
In order to be able to download ‘Chords’ versions of songs from Ultimate Guitar in a text format, you can import published songs by using the SBP import functionality. This does NOT work with songs you have made private edits on. In my case, I had a LOT of songs I’ve edited and you cannot import those from Ultimate Guitar using SongbookPro’s search tool.
For your ‘Private edits’, you can download individual songs in text format (using their web site), by opening up personal edited ‘Chords’ song. You can then press the a ‘Download’ button in the bottom right of the screen and then download your song to your downloads folder, as a file called:
Artist — Title.txt
With the large library of personal edited songs, I found a way to ‘bulk’ download my collection. From the main menu (using the web site):
- Click on ‘MY TABS’.
- Click on one of your edited songs.
- Click on ‘Edit’.
- You should now have a number of menu items on the left side of the screen.
- Click on ‘My Contributions’.
- You should see two tabs called Tabs and Personal tabs.
- Click on Personal tabs.
- On the top far right of this screen, click on ‘Download all tabs’.
I received a message that said “It will take some time. Please don’t close or reload the page”. After minute (at least for me), UG zipped up ALL my personal edits and downloaded them to a file called:
mytabs-2024-622.zip
Inside were ALL my personal edited songs in a .txt format, each with a file name of Artist — Title.txt.
As a caveat, an associate of mine with a Mac had a few personal edited songs, however the songs never did download. Due to time limitations, we didn’t test on different days/times or with different browsers.
WARNING: Before tranposing the key of songs, you may just want to do so in SongbookPro.
Choosing A Conversion Method
Depending on the number of songs in your Ultimate Guitar (or other) library, may affect how you wish to import them into SongbookPro.
- Do you have a few songs, do you have 100 or 500?
- Have you made personal edits of your songs? Many personal edits or few?
- Are you adept with using text editors and computers in general?
- Are you OK with using a manual method or would you like to automate some of the process?
Some methods include:
- SongbookPro’s Search Online for importing published songs.
- Basic cut and paste of songs from your library, followed by lots of editing.
- Importing PDF files, with the main drawback that you can’t transpose the key on the fly.
- Using web based online converters, such as https://ultimate.ftes.de/ and https://chords.menees.com/
- Bill Menees (see above), also has a github page to help automate the process https://github.com/menees/Chords (I had some issues using it, and ended up writing Notepad++ macros instead).
- Writing text editor (Notepad++) macros in order to massage the text of your songs to be imported into SongbookPro.
Ultimate Guitar Transpose Issues
As I was building up my collection of songs for our beginners guitar group, I found several songs that:
- Were in a key that we couldn’t play.
- Were sloppily written.
I initially transposed a published version of a song and printed it out to PDF file for our group. Once I made private edits of songs, transposing to a playable key and then printing to PDF no longer worked. As a result, I
- Viewed a song.
- Transposed it.
- Copied the transposed text.
- Opened the editor.
- Pasted the transposed text into the editor.
- Saved the transposed song.
This is a serious bug on the part of Ultimate Guitar and they did not provide any timeframe or priority for this issue. In the meantime, many of my songs were now in a key that we could play (which as it turns out is not a good thing).
There’s actually few steps missed between 3 and 4 due to another issue with Ultimate Guitar. Read on. . .
Ultimate Guitar Cut and Paste
To make matters worse, at least for this Windows user, when I copy and pasted a transposed song into the Ultimate Guitar editor, I ended up with extra lines throughout the songs. For that issue, I ended up writing a Notepad++ macro to search for:
\r\n\r\n
and Replace ALL with:
\r\n
I copied the transposed song, pasted it into NotePad++, ran my macro and then copied and pasted that back into Ultimate Guitar. This was yet another challenge thanks to the Ultimate Guitar’s web site. Of course, there’s no priority to fix this as far as I can tell.
Transposing Songs in SongbookPro
I took a difficult road and transposed the text of my songs in Ultimate Guitar, mainly because I couldn’t easily cut and paste the text with SongbookPro.
Turns out in SongbookPro, you can go into the editor and change the original key of the song, which will result in changing the key of song in the editor. That would have saved me a LOT of time.
Ultimate Guitar Keys – Prepping to Migrate
One of the cool features of SongbookPro is the Key/Capo visualization in the top right corner of a song, such as:
The song is played in the key of D, and you would play in the key of C with a Capo 2.
If you wish to use this feature, work out the quickest and most accurate method of doing so. Performing this in Ultimate Guitar was painful.
Learning SongbookPro
Prior to migrating my song collection to SongbookPro, I practiced importing songs and syncing to another device. I edited test songs, synced to another device, performed backups and restorations. I ended up creating a SongbookPro database, adding/deleting songs, deleting the database and so on. I became comfortable with the platform prior to the big migration.
Testing Imports
When I first imported a few songs from my Ultimate Guitar collection, each file was named:
Artist — Title (12345678).txt
In addition, the first line of the text file was:
Artist — Title
When you import that song directly into SongbookPro, it won’t differentiate the Artist from the Title, so ‘Chicken Fried’ by the ‘Zac Brown Band’ will be imported as a Title called:
Zac Brown Band — Chicken Fried
In order to isolate the song title from the author, we need to get a basic understanding of the ChordPro format that SongbookPro is capable of importing. Unfortunately, Ultimate Guitar doesn’t use ChordPro formatting.
Yet again, it may be easier to import published songs using SongbookPro’s search tool rather than going through all this.
ChordPro Title and Author
In the text of the song, here is what the ChordPro format for the above song should look like:
{title: Chicken Fried}
{artist: Zac Brown Band}
And here’s what we start out with:
Zac Brown Band — Chicken Fried
In order to convert from one to the other, we need to automatically separate the title of the song from the author and we’ll do so by searching on that ‘dash’ bar in the text. It turns out that that dash bar is not a standard ‘-‘ from your keyboard. It’s a unicode character called <alt>0151, as in press the alt button and then type 0151 on your Numpad. You should be able to do that in any text editor.
Writing a Notepad++ Macro
I use Notepad++ because it’s free, supports Macros AND you can run that Macro hundreds of times. Furthermore, within a Macro, you can save a file, close the file, and open up the next one. With a well designed Macro, you can run it with a single command on hundreds of files at once. . . which is what I did after several test runs. From the Notepad++ manual:
https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/macros/
Furthermore, from the ‘Macro’ menu, you can ‘Run a Macro Multiple Times…”
You can then pick which macro to run and how many times you wish to run it. Since I had 472 songs, that’s how many times I ran the macro.
Prior to writing the ‘conversion’ macro, I tested several short ones on a single file, followed by doing so on mulitple files.
My Title and Artist Macro
The key to this macro was:
- That I could open ALL 472 of my songs at once.
- Knowing that the title/artist were on the first line of the file.
- That <alt>0151 was the dash separator between them.
- That I could save the file, close the file and go onto the next one.
To start recording a macro, go to the Notepad++ Macro menu and select ‘Start Recording’. In addition, write your macro on a test file only, and not in the same directory as your Ultimate Guitar imported files (which you’ve already unzipped and stored somewhere safely).
Here are the keys I pressed when writing my title/artist separator macro for multiple files. The alt button will be shown as <alt>. Same with the <del>, <backspace>, <ctrl>, <space>, <end> and <cr> or carriage return buttons.
{Artist:<space>
<ctrl>f
<alt>0151
<Find Next>
<Close the search window>
<backspace>
<backspace>
}
<cr>
{Title:<space>
<end>
}
<ctrl>s
<ctrl>w
Once you’ve written this macro, you then go to the Notepad++ Macro menu and press ‘Stop Recording’. Then you should be able to ‘Save Current Recorded Macro’ and give it a name.
From there, you:
- Close any open files in Notepad++.
- Go to your directory with all your Ultimate Guitar imported files.
- Make sure you know exactly how many files there are.
- In Notepad++, go ‘File Open’ and open ALL of the files.
- Once they’re open, select Macro.
- ‘Run a Macro Multiple times.
- Select the macro to run.
- Type in the number of files you want to convert.
- Press ‘Run’ and let ‘er rip.
If you’ve done everything correctly, ALL of your files should now have ChordPro delineators for Artist and Title. If not, it’s back to the drawing board to either fix or choose another method.
To Import or not Import
In my case, I imported the Artist/Title modified files directly into SongbookPro. There were still issues remaining such as:
- Key
- Capo setting
- Duration
- Verse, chorus and other section delineators
In the case of ‘Key’, Songbook Pro detected the key, but not the capo setting. Also duration is something I added based on the length of the MP3’s I used for our group.
As for section delineators, Verse and Chorus were detected and converted to ChordPro (or SongbookPro) format quite nicely. For instance:
The verse is in a different font size than the text, so it was successfully detected. On the other hand, some delineators didn’t convert, such as:
The ‘Instrumental’ delineator was not successfully detected, and in order to fix this, I edited the song in SongbookPro and added a colon or ‘:’ to the end of Instrumental, so it looked like Instrumental:
Here’s the result:
Final Cleanup
I spent a long time ensuring that the key that we listened to was the same key as the original key of the song, and I adjusted the Capo to suit a playable key.
I fixed up a lot of delineators that weren’t detected as well as adding duration to the songs so that the auto scroll didn’t require me to drag the screen as I was playing the song or keep having to press my Bluetooth page turning pedal all the time.
In some songs, people occasionally wanted to play in a different key, so I transposed on the fly, and then transposed back when done. Since I have a poor memory, I added text at the beginning of EVERY song, that said original the key and capo setting such as as:
Capo: 1 Bb (A)
Essentially, the resulting key is Bb, using chords in the key of A. This way, I could transpose back to the original settings.
For songs that used a drop tuning, I imported the MP3 into my DAW software called ‘Reaper’ and increased the pitch by a semi-tone, so that we could listen to and play the song with easy open chords.
To make matter more complicated, in my DAW, I edited out long/difficult instrumentals, so our group was able to continue playing along with them.
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