Collections

Collections are more specialized than tags: you can reorder the contained items and you can perform various options on some of them. This specialization comes at a cost: Collections can only hold one type of item, and collectible items are Songs, Chords, Scales, Chord fingerings, and Scale fingerings.

You create a collection from the home screen, by tapping the New collection button in the adequate sections. The kind of items the collection will hold is defined at this point.

Once you tap this New collection button, the app presents a new blank collection in “Edit” mode. You can append items with the Append button at the bottom left, and select some items to be deleted by simply tapping on them and validating with the Delete button at the bottom right.

Please note that only tagged or custom items can be collected. If you want to add a chord or a scale fingering to a collection, it has to be tagged first (with any tag). Custom items are always available.

When a collection is in “Edit” mode, you can furthermore drag and drop items to reorder them. You can also give a name to the collection by tapping the title at the top of the screen. When you tap the “Done” button, the collection exits the “Edit” mode, but please note that your changes are effectively saved only when you go back or exit this collection screen. A collection can then be tagged as any other item in the app.

You can delete collections in the Settings of the app, Documents section, Documents tab (because collections can be tagged, they are handled as documents internally). Deleting a collection does not delete its collected items. Song collections can furthermore be deleted in the song list view, by sliding the corresponding row to the left.

Collections are not holding their content, they “link” it. During a cloud synchronization, the collection may be synced before some of its content. In this case, the corresponding collected item may not be on your device yet, and the app will display Item Unreachable. This should resolve by itself. These unreachable items can be deleted as other items if needed.

Song collections

Song collections have a unique property: they can be easily shared with other users of the app. When you tap the Export button, the app generates a ChordSongSet file. These files can be sent to other users and Opened in… Chord! on their devices. The app will then present an “Import” screen that allows to select only a few songs and import them into their songbook. Songs are never overwritten and if the same song already exists, a copy will be created. Please note that not all apps display an Open in… menu. For example, at least up to iOS8, iMessage doesn’t allow to do this, but the email app does, as well as Dropbox for example.

Songs collections can’t be exported yet as PDF songs books, but this is something planned for a future release.

Tapping on songs in collections launches the song’s display view. Please note that if the negative theme is selected for song display, the collection view will adapt too so you can jump back from a song without being blinded.

Chords and chord fingerings collections

Chord collections (and also Chord fingerings collections) have a unique feature: they can be imported into the palette when writing a song. They can furthermore be transposed on the fly while doing so. You can thus use chord collection to save chord progressions without having to care about the key.

Chord collections can’t be exported yet. Chord fingerings collections can be exported as PDF files, or JPG or PNG images. Please note that in these two last cases, only the first page will be exported, so the app will return a simple image that can be saved in your photo library and cropped. PDF files are exportable as any other PDF in the app. Please note that the export templates used are specific for chord (or scale) fingerings. The app uses different templates when exporting individual songs. Requirements and options are indeed very different in both cases.

Scale and scale fingerings collections

This is the same as for chords: scale collections are not exportable to PDF’s, but scale fingerings collections are.

Collections of scale (and not scale fingerings) have a very specific characteristic: instead of depicting them as a chromatic circle (like it’s the case for chord collections), scales are displayed as notes on the fretboard (using the current tuning). This is because this representation is univocal (once a tuning is set) and feels more natural than a chromatic circle. Tapping on them will bring you to the scale details view (and not the scale fingerings view as it’s the case for collections of scale fingerings). To help you disambiguate with scale fingerings collections, the thumbnail of the collection shows a chromatic circle instead of a fretboard.