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.
The original solution: Print each song individually to PDF file and store locally.
The drawback: This was done one labourious song at a time, and you lose the ability to transpose the chords along with ALL of the metadata (title/artist, etc that could be imported into another app and sorted on). In addition, UG’s page breaks can separate chords from lyrics.
My eventual solution: Bulk export of my entire Ultimate Guitar song listings and then bulk convert those files to (quasi) ChordPro format so as to retain the metadata and be able to import into 3rd party apps.
How did it go? Wrote a macro in Notepad++ to massage the text files a bit, but I WAS somewhat successful!
Update (a few weeks later):
I’ve migrated my songs to Songbook Pro, and it was a LOT of work, primarily because I wanted song information to look consistent and that I wanted to uses the capo facilities provided by Songbook Pro. Ultimate Guitar did not make ANY of this easy, but at least I WAS able to export songs en masse. It could’ve been worse.
Result: I’ll be using Songbook Pro for practicing on my own, however I won’t be able to use it on an overhead projector in a group setting as the song index is barely legible on a 1920×1080 projector from 20′ away.
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