SongCharter
Guide › Audio ideas

The song starts before the chart.

Most song ideas are born as a hum at 11pm and die in a voice memo nothing ever picks up. Audio ideas catch them: sing or play what you’ve got, and the words come back written down — transcribed on your device, never uploaded.

Record an idea

In the app, tap Add a song → Audio idea — it’s the first door. One big button: tap to start, tap the square to stop. There’s no length cap; a ten-minute jam is a legitimate idea.

The recording is saved the moment you stop — before anything else happens. A phone call mid-take, a swipe to the home screen, even a transcription that fails: in every case the take is already safe and already plays.

Audio ideas live in the iPhone & iPad app. A web browser has no on-device transcriber, so on songcharter.app the door stays put away.

What comes back

Your words, laid out the way you sang them: sentences become lines, and a long instrumental gap — an intro, a turnaround — becomes a section break, shown as a blank line. Nothing is labelled Verse or Chorus for you; the split is the value, and naming a section is a guess only you should make.

Recent iPhones and iPads write the words down well — singing, humming, even singing over a guitar. On older devices the take still saves and plays; you type the words yourself. Either way, nothing ever leaves the device.

The Ideas tab

Ideas get their own tab in the library, beside Songs and Sets — because an idea isn’t a song yet; it’s the thing that makes one. Recording ideas is free and unlimited. Each idea names itself after the first line you sang; tap the title to rename it. Deleting an idea deletes its recording too.

Ideas live on your device only. A backup file carries your songs and sets — it can’t carry recordings, so an idea you’d hate to lose is worth turning into a chart.

From idea to chart

Open an idea and the words sit in one editable box — fix a misheard line, move a blank line to move a section break, exactly like editing a note. Then tap Make a chart from this. That creates a real song — transposable, capo-aware, ready for a setlist — and spends a free-tier slot like any song of your own. The idea stays where it was, linked to the chart it became, with the recording still playable.

Chords come next: tap any word on the chart and put a chord over it. The editing chapter covers it.