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ChordLanes transforms your music playing experience by offering a one-stop hub to streamline the often overwhelming aspects of centralizing, organizing and teaming up on written music assets, jams, rehearsals, and gigs. Easily import and consolidate your lyrics and chords into a single platform, and access them from all your devices. Transpose your songs with a click, curate custom set lists, associate songs with bands and gigs, and better collaborate with your fellow musicians to make great music without the overhead.
Some common scenarios where ChordLanes can help:
ChordLanes is built by musicians for musicians, and strongly emphasizes collaboration and community. The ChordLanes platform is continuously growing to offer additional capabilities, and we would love to hear your feedback and suggestions - just email us at support@chordlanes.com.
Here is the typical initial flow most new users will want to try:
When you are not logged in, you can view the featured charts. These featured charts are charts that users made public, and that we thought are good to showcase to all site users and guests. You can select these charts to see their chords and lyrics, and you can transpose them. You can also check out the docs, FAQs, and our blog.
Most of the site's functionality however does require you to be logged in with your free or pro plan. When you initially sign up, you will be assigned to the free plan, but can upgrade later through your Account page.
A free plan allows you to view and export all public entities (all the charts, lists, bands and gigs set to public visibility). It also allows you to view and export (but not edit) all entities shared with you. Under a free plan, you cannot create, edit or delete charts, bands or gigs. You can however create lists and attach charts to them, and share your lists with others. You can also temporarily transpose charts. You can chat with other users and join the community forums.
A pro plan is a paid plan, and it offers the complete ChordLanes feature set. With a pro plan, you can create your own unlimited entities (charts, lists, bands and gigs), set other users as editors or viewers, or share for general public viewing if desired. Import charts from different file formats and easily transpose them. Attach an entity to another entity to connect your charts, lists, bands and gigs in any way you want. Access a comprehensive library of chords for different instruments. Chat with other users and with the Adviser AI-powered chatbot, and join the community forums.
In general, the pro plan can add, edit, attach and share any entity, while the free plan can add lists and mostly view other entities.
The following table summarized the differences between the plans:
| Capability | Free | Pro |
| Add | Only lists | Any entity (charts, lists, bands and gigs) |
| View | Entities you own, shared with you, or with public visibility | Entities you own, shared with you, or with public visibility |
| Edit | Only lists you own | Any entity you own, or shared with you as editor |
| Duplicate | Only lists you own | Any entity you own |
| Attach | Charts to lists you own |
* Charts to lists you own * Charts, lists and gigs to bands you own * Charts and lists to gigs you own |
| Share |
Visibility * Set lists you own as private, restricted or public Roles * Set any user as a viewer on restricted lists you own * Set any pro user as an editor on restricted lists you own |
Visibility * Set any entity you own as private, restricted or public Roles * Set any user as a viewer on restricted entities you own * Set any pro user as an editor on restricted entities you own |
| Export | Any entity you can view | Any entity you can view |
| Delete | Only lists you own | Any entity you own |
| Chords | No access to chord library | Full access to chord library |
| Chat | With any user | With any user, and with the Adviser chatbot |
| Price | Free! | $7.99/month |
Entities are the collective name for charts, lists, bands and gigs. Entities can be attached to others entities to build relationships. This way you can attach charts to a list or to a gig, attach lists and charts to a band, attach a gig to a band, etc.
Any entity has only one owner (the user who created it). As an owner, you can set the entity's visibility to control access, allowing you to keep private entities private and making others public, or make them restricted and share them with specific users for viewing or editing. Note that only users on the pro plan can be set as editors.
You and all other logged-in users can rate any entity on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. The cumulative rating for an entity is the average rating given by all users, and you can click on it to add your rating or change it.
Charts are the most important entity in the system. Each chart represents a song, with its chords and lyrics and with other metadata like artists, title, key, duration and genre. Charts are added by pro users and, as controlled by the owner, can be viewed by any user, specific users, or no other users.
As a pro user, you can add a chart manually or by importing it from a file.
As a chart owner or editor, you can edit any part of the chart - artists, title, key, content, etc. All chart fields accept UTF-8 characters so you can enhance textual input with fun icons.
The content of the chart is where the chords and lyrics are. Each line will be automatically colorized with a color that represents its type - chords, lyrics, mixed, annotation, or break. When editing a chart, you can use these markers at the beginning of a line to set its type:
If no markers are provided, ChordLanes will automatically analyze the content when the chart is saved, and will add the markers and colors based on the auto-detected line type.
During editing, you can also use these hotkeys:
The replacement string can include the following special replacement patterns:
Charts can be set to auto-scroll at different speeds. This is useful for practice and performances when you need the chart to roll automatically, saving you the need to manually scroll it down every few seconds.
While auto-scrolling, you can also use these hotkeys:
Lists are an ordered collection of charts. All registered users can create lists, even if they are on the free plan. Lists can be used to:
Any registered user can create a new list. When creating a list, you can specify its name, and add notes and media links.
For lists of which you are an owner or editor, you can use the Attach screen to add to this list any chart you can see (any chart that is public, or any restricted chart of which you are an owner or an editor). You can use the Share screen to share your list with specific users or publicly. Note that these users may not see every chart you added - they will see in your list only the charts they can see - public charts, and restricted charts shared with them specifically.
A band represents a user or users that play and perform together. Bands can be attached to charts, lists, and gigs.
Any pro user can create bands. Like all other entities, a band has one owner, and the owner can set the band with a private, public, or restricted visibility. Bands with a restricted visibility can have specific users set as viewers or editors (only pro users can be set as editors).
A gig is an event scheduled to a specific date and at a specific location. Gigs can be attached to charts and lists, and allow you to prepare and perform more easily.
Any pro user can create gigs. Like all other entities, a gig has one owner, and the owner can set the gig with a private, public, or restricted visibility. Gigs with a restricted visibility can have specific users set as viewers or editors (only pro users can be set as editors).
Entities can be imported into ChordLanes from a file.
The following file types are supported for each entity type:
All file types can be used to import a single entity. The CSV file type can also be used to import multiple entities, with each row representing one entity. The CSV file must have a "Type" column that specifies the type of the entity in each row - Chart, List, Band, or Gig. Each row must also specify the mandatory fields of its entity - a chart row must specify the chart title, and a list row must specify the list name. You can download these CSV templates as a starting point:
When importing a JSON file, the JSON content can specify any entity field. So for charts for example, the JSON can have the chart artists, title, content, and any other chart field. The exact JSON format to import an entity is identical to the JSON format of that entity exported, so to see the valid JSON format for importing a chart, for example, you can just export an existing chart to JSON and see its structure.
For charts, when importing from any file type other than JSON and CSV, the chart part that will be imported is the chart content, and ChordLanes will be expecting the file to provide chords and lyrics in a standard chord chart format (chords above the lyrics). If the file is an image, ChordLanes will use OCR technology to convert the image to text.
Optical character recognition is not a perfect technology and may produce inaccurate results. Here are some tips that can improve import results for images:
Entities can be attached to each other (added to each other) to create relationships. For example, and depending on your plan and role, you create a list by attaching (adding) charts to it, and you can attach a chart to different lists. You can attach charts and lists to a band or a gig, and you can attach gigs to a band.
Users on a free plan can only attach public charts to a list they own. Users on the pro plan can attach any entity they can see to any entity of which they are owners or editors.
Sharing gives you the ability to collaborate with other users and work together on reviewing and editing charts, lists, bands and gigs. The entity owner can control the visibility of the entity (private, restricted or public), and for a restricted entity also decide which specific users can view or edit (only pro users can edit).
Sharing is useful in many scenarios:
All entities - charts, lists, bands and gigs - have a visibility setting that you can set as the owner. This visibility has these options:
Some important notes:
Roles are specified by an entity owner, and control the permissions a specific user has for a specific entity. There are three roles available:
Registered users can export any entity to different file formats. These exports are useful in these scenarios:
Entities can be exported to these file formats: plain text, PDF, DOCX, JSON, and CSV.
Entity exporting can be done from the entity list (by selecting the desired entities - up to 5 - and exporting), or from the single entity view. In both cases, each entity will be exported to its own separate file.
Entities can also be "exported" to a print view that is printer-friendly and removes all elements not necessary for a printed copy. Many browsers will also allow you to save the printed view as a PDF.
All logged-in users can start a private chat with each other. Anywhere you see a username, just click on it to open the chats view, send a message, read an incoming message, and see the chat history.
The chats are aimed at letting users communicate privately and directly. Please follow these basic rules when chatting with other users:
A red marker showing on a chat is an indicator that this chat has new messages awaiting for you.
The forums are a ChordLanes community feature that allows users to collaborate and communicate directly on any music-related topic, discuss songs and lyrics, advertise and request gigs, look for musicians, and buy and sell gear.
Forums are grouped by topic (e.g., "Bands", "Gigs", "Gear"). Each forum consists of threads. Each thread consists of posts (the initial thread and the replies), showing in a reverse chronological order. All forums are open to all registered users (on any plan), and all users can start new threads, view all posts, and post replies.
The forums are aimed at creating a safe, positive and useful environment for all community members. Please follow these basic rules:
A red marker showing on a forum thread is an indicator of a relevant update awaiting for you. This marker will show when:
The Adviser provides AI-powered and context-sensitive assistance on general music domains and data within ChordLanes. Think of it as your personal know-it-all expert conveniently integrated into the ChordLanes interface. The Adviser is available to all users on the pro plan.
To access the Adviser, select the icon on the bottom right corner, and type in your prompt. Some examples of how the Adviser can help:
These are the site design guidelines we follow:
Although the site will generally work on the smaller phone screen, it is mostly designed for larger laptop and tablet screens.
By design, the UI is kept simple with quick access to core screens and actions. Our assumption is that you want the site to provide a streamlined and fun experience, so we tried to minimize any unnecessary distractions.
We tried to account for international audiences whose charts are not necessarily using English and not written left to right.
We tried to account for users used to keyboard shortcuts. You will still need to rely on the mouse a lot, but can use some keyboard shortcuts when editing, transposing and scrolling charts. Supported keyboard shortcuts are listed above in their relevant sections.