Chord Provider

A ChordPro viewer, editor and PDF exporter for macOS

ChordPro

ChordPro is an open standard text format and its has its own official reference implementation. I contributed a lot to its Open Source code. While I hope you like Chord Provider, as guitar player or macOS programmer, it is just my hobby project. Go there for the full Chordpro experience.

Chord Provider

Chord Provider is written in Swift 6 and SwiftUI and needs minimum macOS Sonoma.

There are many ChordPro parsers in this world, however, almost none are really native in the macOS world, it is often an afterthought... Not for me. I'm Mac user only and I don't use iStuff.

SwiftUI is great and fun, however, on the mac... Not always. Chord Provider has awful hacks to deal with a SwiftUI DocumentGroup Scene. For years. While I love my Mac, in Cupertino it has not the highest priority...

The icon

A Telecaster shape, of course! In mid 2016 I felt in love with a guitar. An 'Olympic White'. That is the color of the shape. The background is a suitable modification of her 'plate'.

What can Chord Provider do?

• It will view and/or edit ChordPro files.
• It can export your song to a PDF document.
• It can also export a whole folder with ChordPro songs to a PDF with a Table of Contents.
• It has an editor that highlights your chords and directives with colours you can change in the settings and you can edit a directive by double-clicking on it.
• It knows most of the ChordPro directives, but not all and my implementation is not always according the official reference implementation.
• It can show diagrams for the guitar, guitalele and ukulele.
• You can click on a chord diagram and it will open a Sheet with all known versions.
• It can transpose a song; however, only in the View. The document will not be changed and that's on purpose.
• You can 'define' a Capo but that will not change any notes in the document; again on purpose.
• It can play chords with MIDI with a guitar instrument that you can select in the settings.
• It can play audio songs or videos when stored next to the ChordPro file,
• Full 'left-handed' chords support.
• It has a 'quicklook' plugin for ChordPro files. Select a song in the Finder and press space. Images are not supported in the preview.
• It makes thumbnails for your ChordPro files.

Optional use the ChordPro CLI reference implementation for PDF creation

The official reference implementation of the ChordPro format is much more powerful to create PDF's.

If you have the CLI utility installed on your system, Chord Provider can optional use it for creating PDF's.

Binaries

I like Swift and SwiftUI but I don’t like the more and more lockdown of my beloved macOS. I don’t have a Developer account.

Theoretically for a good reason but in practise a little bit less. I have no intension to bring Chord Provider to the Apple Store but I also can't provide an easy compiled binary here on GitHub because it is not notarised and signed by the almighty gatekeeper.

Well, the source is free!

Limitations

Some other guitar applications claim the ownership of ChordPro files and then the quicklook does not work anymore. Chord Provider does not own them; nobody should...

Not all chords in the database are correct; especially the more complicated chords. Feel free to contribute!

It is not a complete implementation of the ChordPro standard. Again, this is my hobby project for my own needs. The official ChordPro implementation might serve you better.

Thanks

Stole code (and ideas) from:

• Swifty Chords
• SongPro for Swift
• Conscriptor
• PdfBuilder
• HighlightedTextEditor
• LNTextView

How to compile

Xcode 16 is required.

1. Clone the project.
2. Change the signing certificate to your own.
3. Build and run!

Chord Provider does not use any external packages.