Your book is a link from a chord site, a hook you sang into your phone at 11pm, photos, PDFs, a bandmate's Google Doc, a text file from 2019. SongCharter has a door for each — and they all lead to the same place: one clean, editable, transposable chart.
Tap New song, then take a photo — or pick one from your library. The page is read on your device, with an automatic second look for hard pages like handwriting. A long chart split across several photos stitches back into one song: shoot the pages in order and select them together.
Photos are read once to build the chart and are never stored on our servers. Photographing charts needs the app itself — it's the part that runs on your device.
The same door takes files: plain text, ChordPro (.cho, .chopro, .crd, .pro), Markdown, and PDFs with real text in them. ChordPro files keep their stated key and capo — the chart arrives knowing what the file said about itself.
Two kinds of link come in. A Google Doc — bands keep charts there, and a Doc is the cleanest input there is: no camera, no guessing. And a chord-site page — paste the address of the page you were already reading and the chart is lifted out of it, leaving the ads, the ratings line and the comments behind. Copy the link, tap Import from a link, and paste. Your iPad fetches the page itself, exactly as if you had opened it in Safari; nothing passes through our servers. The first time you bring in a chord-site page, the app shows you that site's terms and asks you to accept them.
If the app says the doc isn't shared: in Drive, set Share › General access › Anyone with the link › Viewer, then paste it again. Link import lives in the app — a browser isn't allowed to make that request.
Some songs never were a document. They start as a hum at 11pm. Tap Record, sing or play what you have, and the words come back written down with the take kept beside them — an Audio idea door does the same thing from the add-a-song screen. The listening and the transcription both happen on your device and the audio is never uploaded, which is the one door here that needs no network at all.
Tap Paste a chart and paste any chart as text — chords over words, chords in brackets, or a bandleader chart with the changes named once per section. Paste works everywhere, including the browser. No chart handy? Use an example fills one in so you can see the whole flow.
A dense or beat-up page sometimes comes through with a few chords wrong. You don't re-shoot — you fix. Edit text shows exactly what was read, as plain text; correct the stray chords and tap Chart it again. On real-world pages the typical repair is a handful of chords, a minute or two — far faster than typing the chart from scratch.