[erhe]

This is not a big deal, but maybe it resonates with someone.

Sometimes I do song charts like this: (no, I don't speak the language and I'm relying on Google Translate)

Code:

    (chorus)
    | Gm        Eb       |
        phiriẏē dā'ō
    | F         Bb /A /G /F  | Gm      Eb   | F    /Bb /A /G /F |
        āmāra-i prēma    tumi  phiriẏē dā'ō
    | Gm        Eb       |
        phiriẏē dā'ō
    | F        Bb      | D               | D     |
        hārānō dinagulō   ēbhābē calē yē'ō nā

In other words, I'm inserting barlines - and sometimes even time signature changes - between chord symbols. This lets me follow the concrete time structure and play along songs I'm not too familiar with, or sometimes can't even follow the correlation between written and spoken/sung words, even if "romanised" like that. The notation works great, it's very quick and easy to do, no slow-to-enter staff notation required, etc. There's no need to have five horizontal lines, or a rigid grid that cannot accommodate lyrics, to represent a time dimension with actual musical measures.

But sometimes when space is tight, I may have to add a barline immediately next to a chord symbol, and this breaks MobileSheets's chord symbol detection, so transposing stops working. For example this does not work:

    |Gm |Cm |Eb |F  | 

So what I'm suggesting is, if the parsing logic recognized barlines (pipe symbols), it could find chord symbols even if not separated with whitespace. (By the way, if I have understood correctly, Bengali pop musicians use E flat tuned guitars almost exclusively.  )

With barlines added, a text song chart includes actual musical timing information, so that it can even be parsed to a MIDI file. 

Another thing I'd like to do with chord symbols in text files is, to really generate MIDI from the symbols. Either controlling playback with foot pedals, pressing a button to go to the next/previous chord/bar/beat/part, or even having a MIDI clock do the timing. This way I could be playing guitar or bass, while playing synth pad chords or an arpeggiator or something. A simple text song chart has all the necessary information, so why re-do the notation in a sequencer. I guess asking for .txt file chord MIDI playback features is a stretch, but just saying.

[Zubersoft]

MobileSheets will ignore barline characters when parsing chords, otherwise it can intefere with identifying chord lines (compared to lyric lines). This is by design as it was causing problems for users in the past. However, it does require space between the bar and the chord. So I can look into removing the barline character at the start of a chord when processing the chord lines, and replace them with spaces instead, as removing them would intefere with the logic to line up the chords with the lyrics underneath them.

Mike

[erhe]

MobileSheets will ignore barline characters when parsing chords, otherwise it can intefere with identifying chord lines (compared to lyric lines). This is by design as it was causing problems for users in the past. However, it does require space between the bar and the chord. So I can look into removing the barline character at the start of a chord when processing the chord lines, and replace them with spaces instead, as removing them would intefere with the logic to line up the chords with the lyrics underneath them.

Mike

Thanks. Yes, I meant removing the need to wrap barlines with spaces. A barline cannot be a part of a chord symbol anyway, and there shouldn't be a need to have barlines in the middle of lyrics either, so it should be safe.