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Chordbutter – songwriting tool for chords and lyrics
Anyone used Chordbutter? https://apps.apple.com/au/app/chordbutter-progression-tool/id6471820796
It’s very much a variation on the same dev’s quite nice Tonaly (formerly Ultimate Circle of Fifths?), taking the latter’s core chord/key mapping functionality and extending its songwriting framework, giving you a text editor for lyrics, a “studio” for designing a basic backing track, easier access to chord inversions/voicings, etc. It’s freemium, with most of the functions (any key beyond major ones, etc.) locked behind a subscription.
In my journey into the weird and daunting world of conventional songwriting (!), I downloaded it in the first week of release and find the attempt to integrate all these functions in one place tantalising and objectively pretty handy, but also somewhat less than the sum of their parts, at least for now.
One thing in particular drives me nuts: the text editor fades to almost zero opacity when you choose to arbitrarily tap chords from your chart to play them. This happens in order to focus on the chord editor/selector that pops up, which is understandable.
But in my mind, hitting the chords while looking at the lyrics is almost the key use case for such an app. If I were sitting at a piano or strumming a guitar, I’d always be tinkering with particular moments, rather than playing the whole sequenced song — I’d be hitting one or two chords in a tiny sequence again and again, while mumbling different melodic or lyrical options, or reconsidering chords in light of the meter of the line or the melody it might suggest. Um, like those scenes of songwriters at work in the movies. 😂 The fact that I can’t do this without squinting at the lyrics is maddening.
For now I’m just going to have Tonaly and a text editor in split view, but will keep an eye on it with great interest.
There’s a 7 day trial to tick the tyres — see what you think.
Comments
Hi there, this is Chris, the developer of ChordButter. Thank you for your feedback regarding the lyrics editor visibility. I must admit, I hadn't fully considered this particular workflow. I will explore options to enhance this feature, enabling seamless navigation through chords without compromising the lyrics editor visibility. As a temporary workaround, during song playback, you can quickly return to the start of a line by clicking on the ⏮️ icon next to the play button. While this doesn't directly address your concern, it might be useful for now. I greatly appreciate your interest in ChordButter and am eager to hear any further suggestions or feedback you might have!
@tja I get your point and I also like the "update-based" kind of licensing model but unfortunately, Apple does not support it within the App Store. As an indie developer, implementing my own licensing model and managing all the associated tasks is quite challenging so I rely on Apple's business models. So for now, the only way to ensure constant development of this app is through a subscription-based model. In the future, as the app becomes more and more comprehensive, I may consider offering a lifetime license.
@tja Thanks for clarifying! I'll check it out!
https://loopypro.com/pricing has the description of how it works. It’s actually reasonably straightforward, but it won’t work for everyone. I selected that model in particular because I basically plan to keep on working on Loopy Pro for the rest of my career; it only really makes sense from the customer side because features continue to be added over time
+1 for a different pricing model if possible. Was going to write something very similar to what @tja wrote
I own Tonaly and it feels there quite a bit of overlap between the two apps; hopefully improvements to chord progressions generation are implemented in both apps going forward.
If this integrates with OpenAI APIs or similar for lyrics generator, that feature could be enabled using a subscription, giving the user a limited number of tokens per month based on the "plan" selected.
Or instead of a subscription the user could just buy N amount of tokens (like "coins" in mobile games) which could be used for "smart" features in general (e.g. "extra" chord suggestions, thesaurus, add new lyric lines from existing, etc.)
On other features that are more "unlocks" like the ability to save / export, static* song analysis, etc. could be a one time IAP for a "pro" package, with future updates adding significant features following the loopy pro model. (*by "static" I mean that uses an algorithm rather than having to query 3rd party APIs)
Just my two cent though, cause I really like the app design, but personally wouldn't go for a subscription and not being able to save to iCloud / export makes the "free" version feel more like a "demo" version.
Agreed.
The app has been updated and it now offers a lifetime license, however I still hope some of the suggestions that were left in this thread could be considered for future updates