Chordshop 

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What is Chordshop?

Chordshop produces high quality PDF chord sheets and songbooks. It uses the general ChordPro format and adds some extensions of its own. These extensions allow for advanced features like the support of measures, on-the-fly transposition, and dual chord lines to show capoed chords along with the actual chords. 

It also provides a handy GUI to aid in the editing of ChordPro files and the creation of chord diagrams.  The chord explorer is useful for finding new fingerings/voicings for chords. 

I have developed Chordshop on Windows XP, but it should work on any modern Windows.  I used to support Linux as well, so technically you can get it to work with a bit of tweaking.

Is it really free? 

Yes.  It is free and open.  Free use of Chordshop is granted under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Why Use Chordshop?

There are plenty of programs that create songsheets very well, but they typically produce output with too little or too much information, or they require too much effort to make a simple chord sheet. The songsheets that I wanted to produce needed to have the usual chords over lyrics as well as timing and performance information typically found in a leadsheet.

Chordshop provides this mix between a simple chord/lyric sheet and an actual leadsheet. The chords and lyrics can be printed in measures separated by barlines. The barlines can also be "dotted" to indicate repeats, and repeat brackets can be added to measures as well. Sections of songs can be designated as blocks for easy song navigation (e.g. chorus, bridge, verses).

The source files are simple text files in an extended ChordPro format. Your existing ChordPro files can be used as is. (If you want to use Chordshop's advanced features then you will need to add some notation to the files.) Chordshop has a Song Editor built-in which can automatically convert plain text chords into ChordPro format, add directives, transpose chords, and perform other time-saving tasks.

Another major goal of Chordshop was to produce a tool that could be used with any fretted instrument. Most chord programs seem to be guitar-centric. Chordshop produces chord diagrams for any instrument you care to define. (Most common instruments are already defined.) The built-in Chord Explorer supports any tuning with any number of strings. It should help novice and expert alike explore chord voicings for virtually any fretted instrument.

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