Software » Songpress

Songpress - Il Canzonatore

Songpress is a free, easy to use song typeset program for Linux and Windows, that generates high-quality songbooks.

Songpress is focused on song formatting. Once your song is ready, you can paste it into your favorite Windows program, to give your songbook the look you like the most.

Highlights

Produce high-quality guitar scores (text and chords)
Easy to learn, quick to use
You can paste formatted songs into any Linux and Windows application, to layout your songbook with maximum flexibility (Affinity, Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, Microsoft Publisher, Inkscape etc.)
Export formatted songs to SVG, PNG, HTML (web pages and snippets), PPTX (karaoke)
Chord transposition with automatic key detection
Chord simplification for beginner guitarists: determine the easiest key to play your song, and transpose it automatically
Support several chord notations: American (C, D, E), Italian (Do, Re, Mi), French, German and Portuguese; notation conversion
Support Chordpro and Tab (i.e. two-line) chord formats
Clean up dirty songs with spurious blank lines (such as songs copied and pasted from web pages)

If you need help, or wish to discuss, please visit our user support group.

News
Download
Songbook samples
Source code
Some history
Support the project
The ChordPro format

Songpress 1.9.0rc4 Network installer

If you have issues, you can download the previous version:

Songpress 1.8.1 for Windows (22 MB)
(Source code, notes and Linux version)

News

Download

For Windows:

Songpress 1.9.0rc4 Network installer
If you have issues, you can download the previous version:
Songpress 1.8.1 installer (size: 22 MB) for Microsoft Windows.

For Linux:

To install Songpress on Linux, please follow the directions on GitHub.

Songbook samples

How does it look a songbook generated with Songpress? You can find some samples here. If you clic on these images, you will be redirected to our Scout Gruop site, where you can download both the PDF of the songbooks and the original ChordPro files used to generate them.

Songbook for the Holy Mass

Songbooks for cub scouts

Source code

Songpress is released under the terms of an open source license, the GNU General Public License version 2.

You can find more information on the GitHub project repository,

Some history

We started the project in order to create a songbook for the Mass for our boy scout group (please download the songbook (in Italian) if you want to have a look at Songpress output). We quickly created the typesetting algorithm and the clipboard functionality.

In the introduction of the songbook there is a promise:

"In order to quiclky and accurately typeset our songbook, we created a piece of software. [...] Our intention is to improve it and distribute it for free (as an open source software) in our group website."

At the beginning we didn't have much time to improve the software into a complete application for non-geek users. Some times ago we decided to rewrite the program in Python (much more fun to program in than C++)... and the promise has been kept!

Support the project

Songpress is hosted at GitHub (previously, on Google Code and BerliOS).

You can help in several ways:

reporting bugs here
creating new translations
providing artwork (icons, buttons etc.)
joining the project

The ChordPro format

Songpress uses a subset of the ChordPro format. It is very easy to use. Just write plain text (song lyrics), and...

to insert the title, use the {title:My Title} (or {t:My Title}) command: {title:God Save The Queen}
to insert a chord, place it in square brackets, just before the song syllable where the chord "starts": [C]God save our [G]gracious queen
to break a verse, just leave an empty line
to insert a chorus, wrap it inside {soc} (or {start_of_chorus}) and {eoc} (or {end_of_chorus}): {soc}Send her victorious [...]{eoc}
to insert a comment, use the {comment:My Comment} (or {c:My Comment}) command: {c:Repeat twice}
any line that begins with a # does not generate any output

You can find more information about the ChordPro format here.

Contents