A ChordPro file parser and editor for macOS Sequoia. Show the song with the chords for guitar, guitalele or ukulele and export them to PDF.
Chord Provider
A ChordPro viewer, editor and PDF exporter for macOS
ChordPro
ChordPro is an open standard text format and its has an official reference implementation. While I hope you like Chord Provider, as guitar player or macOS programmer, it is just my hobby project.
Chord Provider
Chord Provider is written in Swift 6 and SwiftUI and needs macOS Sequoia.
There are many ChordPro parsers in this world, however, almost none are really native in the macOS world, it is often an afterthought… Not for me. I’m Mac user only and I don’t use iStuff.
The icon
A Telecaster shape, of course! In mid 2016, I felt in love with a guitar. An Olympic White. That is the color of the shape. The background is a suitable modification of her ‘plate’.
What can Chord Provider do?
- It will view your ChordPro files.
- It can export your song as a PDF document or a whole folder with ChordPro songs to a PDF with a Table of Contents
- It has a fancy editor to edit your songs
- It can play the chords with MIDI with a guitar instrument that you can select in the
settings - It can play audio songs or videos when stored next to the ChordPro file
- It has a database with a lot of chords.
- left-handed chords support
Optional use the ChordPro CLI reference implementation for PDF creation
The official reference implementation of the ChordPro format is much more powerful to create PDF’s.
If you have the CLI utility installed on your system, Chord Provider can optional use it for creating PDF’s.
A true macOS application
- It has a quicklook plugin for ChordPro files. Select a song in the Finder and press
space. - It makes thumbnails for your ChordPro files with the Chord Provider icon and the name on the song below. True eye candy!
Besides that; its an interesting project for macOS programmers. It renders PDF’s; use the ViewThatFits magic to show a song in columns, playing MIDI with CoreAudio and deals with the DocumentGroup beast…
It’s editor is written from scratch; in AppKit.
While I studied a lot of code from other projects to learn; in the end, its all included. I don’t like dependencies!
Yes, I dealt with the concurrency challenge!
Binaries
I like Swift and SwiftUI but I don’t like the more and more lockdown of my beloved macOS. I don’t have a Developer account but that should’t be needed to bring an Open Source applications to the mac.
Apple loved Open Source when it needed it. Not anymore.
I have no intension to bring Chord Provider to the Apple Store but I also can’t provide an easy compiled binary here on GitHub because it is not notarised and signed by the almighty gatekeeper. The provided release is only ad-hoc signed.
Well, the source is free!
Open Source software projects should get a free account.
Please read the README.
Install script
There is an Install script in the download if you want to bypass the almighty gatekeeper.
Up to you if you want to use it.
Limitations
Some other guitar applications claim the ownership of ChordPro files and then the quicklook does not work anymore. Chord Provider does not own them; nobody should…
Not all chords in the database are correct; especially the more complicated chords. Feel free to contribute!
It is not a complete implementation of the ChordPro standard. Again, this is my hobby project for my own needs. The official ChordPro implementation might serve you better. I contributed a lot to its Open Source code.
Thanks
Stole code (and ideas) from:
Learned a lot from Swift mailing lists:
I hope you learn something from my project as well!
AI
None of my code is generated by AI. AI is stealing in my opinion. Programming is art.
How to compile
Xcode 16 is required.
- Clone the project.
- Change the signing certificate to your own.
- Build and run!
Chord Provider does not use any external packages.