Chordsheets Project

This project provides users with the ability to generate chordsheets and slides from a single text file, specifically intended for Christian worship chordsheets. The benefits of using such a project include the following:

• Creation of chordsheets in a human-friendly and computer-parsible format
• Generation of clean, well-formatted chordsheets in any desired key
• Generation of slides, both as PDFs and separate PNGs, from the same file, ensuring consistent lyrics between the two
• Formatting is left to the computer, ensuring consistent formatting across chordsheets and slides
• Efficient retrieval and organization of information, including publishing information, so users do not need to worry about retrieving all of the information themselves

Setup

If you just want to access the existing generated chordsheets, simply download directly from Github or clone the project.

To use this project to generate your own chordsheets, follow the below instructions:

1. Clone the project onto your local machine.

2. Install the requests and python-gnupg package through pip, conda, or another python package installer, e.g.

pip install requests python-gnupg

3. Install LaTeX, such as described here. You will need to be able to run pdflatex over command-line (through Python's subprocess module).

4. (Optional) If you want to generate PNG files for each slide, install ImageMagick as instructed here. Make sure that, by the end of installation, convert can be found in your $PATH variable (so that it can be run through Python's subprocess module).

5. (Optional) If you want to allow the tool to collect information about the song from the CCLI website, create a CCLI account. To automatically save your CCLI information, save the username and password in the CONFIGURATION file, or enter it in upon prompting during execution of the script.

6. Create a configuration file in your root project directory called configuration.json, and copy the following contents into it:

{
  "input_directory": "chordsheets_raw",
  "chordsheets_output_directory": "chordsheets_final",
  "slides_output_directory": "slides",
  "ccli_email_address": <email_address>
}

If you chose not to create a CCLI account, omit the last line.

7. (Optional) If you created a CCLI account, to create a GPG public/private key pair, run

python3 -m utils.create_key --user <email_address>

where <email_address> is the email address used for CCLI. Alternatively, you can also create the key with any email address (even a fake one) if you want.

8. (Optional) To encrypt your password for CCLI, run

python3 -m utils.encrypt --user <email_address>

Alternatively, if you have already put the email address in the configuration file and used the same one to generate your key, you can run this wihtout the user input.

Usage

To use this tool, refer to the below instructions. $ROOT will be used to refer to the root project directory.

1. Create the raw chordsheet in $ROOT/chordsheets_raw. Use $ROOT/sample.txt as a guide, or refer to any of the pre-existing raw chordsheets as examples.

2. Run the script on the raw chordsheet by executing from command-line in the root project directory

python3 generate_music.py "<filename>.txt" <new_key>

Note that the script will look for your file in the $ROOT/chordsheets_raw directory. If your song title has whitespace in it, you are recommended to surround the filename in quotes.

For example, to generate chordsheets and slides for "Lion and the Lamb" in B, one might run

python3 generate_music.py "Lion and the Lamb.txt" B

Generated chordsheets---both PDFs and tex files---are saved in $ROOT/chordsheets_final.

Generated slides, including the tex file, PDF, and PNG files---are saved in $ROOT/slides.

3. (Optional) If you need to make tweaks to the output files afterward, navigate to the appropriate directory, modify the tex file, and recompile.

Configuration

Should you desire to change the default directories in which the script looks for your raw chordsheets and outputs generated chordsheets and slides, you can change the defaults in the $ROOT/configuration.json file.

If desired, the JSON format also supports a non-encrypted version of the password, with key "ccli_password" (in which case you can skip steps 7 and 8). However, note that this is not recommended practice as it is insecure.

The old form of configuration file is also supported:

input_directory=chordsheets_raw
chordsheets_output_directory=chordsheets_final
slides_output_directory=slides
ccli_email_address=emailaddress@domain.com
ccli_password=yourpasswordhere

The file should be named as CONFIGURATION.

Testing

This project has so far only been tested on the MacOS operating system with Python 3.6.x. Please report all bugs to Austin Wang, but note that only limited support can be provided to non-UNIX-based systems.

Feature Request

If you would like to contribute features, please contact Austin Wang.

Planned future feature improvements:

• Add support for MusicLine repeats
• Use HTML parser instead of Regex parser for CCLI requests
• Modify raw chordsheet to insert publication information for later offline chordsheet generation
• Add divider for paragraph breaks in chordsheet or slide breaks in slides
• Add support for beat numbers
• Add support for inline repeats
• Add support for guitar chords in sheet
• Better measure representation (better spacing?)
• More accurate internal representation of notes as whole tones and semitones
• Auto chord filling for similar sections
• Add support for converting Ultimate Guitar Tab style chordsheets into raw chordsheet format
• Detection of need for two columns (so lines don't have to be fit if only one column is used)
• Allow for comments in raw chordsheet (using //)
• Encryption support for passwords
• Improve error messages for parsing raw chordsheets