News

In the songbook editor, you can now set the key and capo each song appears in within the songbook. 🎉 Readers then see the song as if it had been written that way - with the chords, key and capo rewritten, on the web, in print and in the PDF. When viewing the songbook, users can still set their own transposition for such a song. The original song stays unchanged.

This comes in handy for a song written in G with a capo on the 2nd fret - in the songbook you can shift it by +2 without a capo, and it sounds exactly the same, just played in A. 🎯 You also no longer need to copy other people's songs just to change the key 🙂.

More changes around keys:

1. Key and capo in playlists - for songs in a playlist, you can now set a capo alongside the transposition. During live sessions, both are shared with everyone following along.
2. Original key - songs now list the key of the original recording instead of a transposition. You'll find it together with the capo in the song info. This field used to be labelled "Transposition", which was ambiguous.
3. Capo in song lists - the capo is shown right next to the key, so it's clear at a glance how to play the song.

This improvement came from the feedback you send us. Thank you! ❤️

Kytario brings three improvements that make both playing and writing songs nicer:

Playlists in the songbook controls - once you pick a playlist in the songbook menu, the arrows in the controls move you through its songs, and a badge above the arrow shows where you are (e.g. 3/12). If you open a song outside the playlist in the meantime, the badge changes colour and the forward arrow takes you back to the playlist. In the songbook index, the Playlist only switch shows just its songs. ⏭️

Transposition with flats - Kytario now supports both sharps and flats. When transposing, it writes chords the way the new key expects them - Bb and Eb in F major, F# and C# in D major. That's why the tonal key in the song details matters now - enter it without the capo, as the chords are written. Songs that aren't transposed stay exactly as their author wrote them. 🎹

Find & replace in the song editor - with the Find & replace button or the Ctrl+F shortcut (⌘F on a Mac), you can search for anything in the song text and replace every occurrence with one click. Handy for rewriting a chord across the whole song, say from {A#} to {Bb}. 🔍

More about writing chords and transposition in the documentation.

The songbook controls - which have barely changed since the very first version of Kytario 😅 - have finally got a makeover. The new controls are more intuitive and open the door to further improvements and development. 💪

The new controls also let you search for and jump to other songs, which saves a lot of clicking back and forth 🙂.

Kytario now also supports the Bulgarian language, which brings support for Cyrillic in song search and indexing 🍻.

Last but not least, we've upgraded the AI model used for song conversion to Claude Sonnet 5.5 (medium effort) and reworked the interface for entering the content to transform 🎉.

We'll keep refining these changes step by step, and we'd love any feedback you have, positive or negative ❤️.

You've surely been there: an instrumental break is coming up, and what looked like four simple chords in a row turned out to be three barely noticeable passing chords and one that dragged on for another 15 seconds. 😅

Because Kytario had no easy way to write this down until now, we've added bar separators - just like the ones you know from regular sheet music.

You write a separator with the {|} symbol, and you can use it in both named and unnamed sections, e.g.: |: {C}{D} {|} {Em} :|. You can read more about them in the Documentation.

Separators are optional, and using them doesn't change the quality rating of a song's notation 🙂.

Kytario let you insert chords of all shapes and notations into your songs. Whether the simple ones - C, Fmaj, Emi - or, for instance, Chords-are-nice-when-you-can-write-whatever-you-want-in-them 😀. Although most chords were written correctly, a lot of chords showed up in the song database that aren't unambiguous (e.g. CM) or contain typos (e.g. Caddd2). 🤯

Chord notation is now stricter and only allows certain modifiers: m, maj, sus, add, aug, dim, the digits 0-9, and parentheses ( and ). These modifiers can then be stacked one after another, as is customary in music theory, i.e.: Cmmaj7 (or Cm(maj7) for better readability), C7add4, and so on. 💡 You'll find all chord shapes in the chord documentation.

The original faulty chord notations have stayed unchanged in your songs for now, but they affect the resulting notation quality rating. So you can go through your chords and fix them. This September we'll then automatically go through the database and try to replace the faulty chords with the correct notation. The ones that can't be replaced unambiguously will then stop rendering. 🥲

This step is essential for Kytario's further development - both technically and in terms of user-friendliness. If you find any chord notation that Kytario doesn't render correctly, please, let us know. ❤️

Playlists can now be published, letting other users browse them just like songbook managers can. 🥳

You'll find the playlist visibility setting in the playlist edit form. A public playlist can only be created by a user who is also a manager of the songbook the playlist belongs to.

You can share a link to a specific playlist with other musicians, so they can get ready for your next gig ❤️.

In Kytario you can now easily view a playlist's contents without leaving the songbook! 🎉 You can do this either by selecting a playlist in the songbook's bottom drop-up menu and then pressing the list-icon button (between the buttons for the previous and next playlist song), or simply by clicking the List -> Filtering buttons and choosing the relevant playlist in the pop-up window.

Songs from a playlist can be further sorted and searched. 🙂 Thanks to this, you can use playlists as sub-songbooks too - for example when you want to categorize songs as 'Hits', '18+' 😅, 'For dancing' or '3/4 rhythm'. 🎉

Kytario now lets you move songs, songbooks and playlists between projects. This simplifies administration, since until now you had to copy the data and then delete it from the old project. 👍

You'll find the move button in the dropdown menu in the list next to each song, songbook or playlist.

💡 When you move a songbook, its individual songs are not moved - you need to do that manually. If you need to move all the data from your project somewhere else, consider whether it's enough to rename your project and create a new one under its original name. 💡

Two changes have landed in Kytario that make working with your songbook easier! 🎉

Transposing songs is now possible even in a songbook that has live mode turned on. Until now you had to turn live mode off - losing the synced scrolling and song switching - transpose the song, and turn the mode back on at the end of the song. 🥵

Now you can simply set the transposition regardless of live mode. Your local transposition is then added to the transposition set by the songbook manager. The transposition always resets back to 0 when you switch songs, just as before. 💡

Easier adding of songs to a songbook thanks to the "Insert into my songbook" button in the songbook's bottom pop-up menu and in the pop-up menu of every song in the song list. This lets you easily browse other users' songbooks and, with just a few taps, add the current song to your own songbook at any time. 😉

Kytario now supports reordering the song list in the PDF file, which can make searching easier for you! 🙂

In the songbook settings (editing) you can now choose whether to order the PDF index by number (the same as on the web), by song name, or by author name. The index in the web and mobile view stays unchanged. The actual order of the songs and their numbers also stays unchanged - the change only affects the index 💡.

The idea for this change came from feedback sent to us by users like you. ❤️ Thank you!

A new mark has been added to the song notation format - {X}, which indicates that no chords are played on that line. From other songbooks you may know it as N.C., a cappella, and similar. 💡

The {X} mark must be written on every line, even when nothing is played throughout the whole section - for example in spoken passages.

The rule that every line must have either a proper chord or, now, the {X} mark still applies and continues to factor into the song's overall quality rating. 🙂

The song list now shows a quality score for each song's markup. This score is based on a syntactic analysis of the song (section lengths, chord markers, etc.), not on its actual content (correct chord alignment, spelling mistakes, etc.).

We'll keep extending the scoring algorithm in the future, so please don't be alarmed if you later see a different score on your song than today 😅.

Why?

Because the reason Kytario came to life was the low quality of song content on other platforms. 🥲 Songs around the web are often unreadable, follow inconsistent markup formats, some of their parts are needlessly long even though they could be written more concisely, and so on. 🙂

Content quality is Kytario's number one priority. 💪 Good content makes your song accessible to other musicians and helps not just you, but the whole community ❤️.

Kytario has a brand-new feature - the Project map 🗺️. Projects (guitar circles, bands, groups around the campfire) can now be discovered and shown to other people. 🙂

Show yourself to the world ❤️ - when you make your project public, it appears on the map at the spot where you play. People walking by can stumble onto it.

Support the scene 🎤 - the more projects on the map, the better you can see how much is going on nearby and where things are alive. 🍻

The map only shows the projects you mark as public yourself. Private groups stay hidden 🔐.

If you want your project on the map, open its settings, upload a photo and description, and mark it as public. Then it'll show up on the map for everyone else too 🌍.

A few silent bugs in song markup have been fixed - little things like two sections in a row without a blank line between them, which were causing Kytario to skip parts of the content. 🤫

So if all of a sudden you spot text in one of your songs that wasn't there before - don't worry, nothing has appeared out of thin air. It's content you typed in the editor at some point, but it never made it into the final view. 👀

At the same time, the song editor now has a markup check - Kytario will flag small mistakes for you, so you don't have to guess why something didn't render the way you wanted. 💪

... so a songbook can now hold up to 2,016 songs! 🎉 That's a glorious 14 pages in the song list, 500 hours of playing and 300,000 words! 😀

If even that's not enough, let us know - and please include some advice on how to remember that many songs 🥲🍻.

When editing or creating a song you can now paste in text with chords in any format 🎉, whether from another website or just as plain text, and let our AI automatically convert it into the Kytario format. 💡

How it works

1. 👉 Open the song editor and click Transform with AI
2. 👉 Paste the song text with chords (any format works)
3. 👉 Click transform, and the AI takes care of the rest
4. 👉 Review the result and tweak it if needed

The AI understands various chord notations (German H as well as English B), recognises section headers like verses and choruses and formats repetition markers correctly. It even optimises line length for better readability. 🙂

You can now search not just by name and author, but also directly in song lyrics! 🎉

Just type any text into the search box - a snippet of a verse, a chorus, or anything you remember from the song - and Kytario will find it. 💪

Search ignores chords and other markup in the song content, so you're searching the plain text. It also works without diacritics - just type „krasna” and „Krásná” will show up too. 🙂

So next time you can't remember the song title, but you do remember it had something about the „moon” - just type it in and see what comes up. 🌙

Something you've been missing ❤️. The songbook can now be scrolled not only with an external „remote” and keyboard, but also with a button (arrow up/down) in the bottom corner of the screen. That comes in handy, for example, when your remote drowns in beer, 😅 or at a small, spontaneous gig where nobody has a remote, and someone with their hands free (e.g. the singer 🎤) takes over. 💪

• When „Scroll mode” is on, this button moves the song by sections, just like pressing the hardware up/down arrow buttons.
• When „Scroll mode” is off, the button scrolls the screen by 40 % of the display height.

Kytario is going beyond borders 🙂! The platform's primary domain is now Kytario.com. Don't worry, old links will keep working - they'll redirect to the new domain. 👍

Alongside this change comes the ability to switch between German and English notation. 🥳 You can flip it via the button in the songbook's bottom expand menu.

• German notation is used in central, northern and south-eastern Europe, and uses the notes B and H.
• English notation is used across most of the world, and uses the notes Bb and B.

German notation is automatically selected when the app is shown in Czech, Polish, Hantec or Swedish. If the app is shown in English, English notation is used.

Along with this change, songbooks now have a notation setting (in the songbook editor), which determines which notation is used when rendering the songbook into PDF. 💪

When editing a song you can now also pick Polish as the song's language. On top of that, the whole site has been translated into Polish, so you can share it with friends across the border too 🙂.

Technical constraints have forced us to limit the maximum number of songs in a songbook to exactly 1,152 songs. 🥲

If your songbook has more than 1,152 songs, the next time you save it you'll get an error and you'll have to trim it down. You can do that for example by creating a new songbook and moving some songs over, or just by tossing out the boring stuff 😉.

Hand on heart - who can actually play that many songs? 😅

The number 1,152 was chosen, among other reasons, because that's exactly how many songs fit onto 8 sheets of the song index 🙂.

Since Kytario is mainly used in the evening and at night, dark mode is now the default.

This small change is easier on your eyes, and when projecting the songbook onto a screen it won't „blast” everyone around with light (which looks bad in photos 🙂).

You've finally got it - Kytario has its own documentation! 🥳 Whether you're here for the first time or you've been using Kytario for 2 years, give it a read and find out what Kytario can do 🙂.

A new Sort button has appeared in the songbook admin section 🙂. If you've been sorting your songbook by hand until now, you can now do it with one (or two 😆) button presses.

You can sort by song name or author. While sorting, special characters (like brackets and dashes) are ignored and diacritics are taken into account. Songs without an author are pushed to the end. 🧠

The admin section - the one you used to get to via the „Admin” button - has been merged with the public part of the site. 😎

Browsing the site is now simpler, you won't have to keep jumping back and forth 🛸.

Songbooks will now automatically have their „live mode” turned off after 8 hours of inactivity 🎉.

This small improvement ensures that songbooks remain more navigable (for people and for search engines) after you've finished playing your event 😉.

After a drawn-out series of changes, link-streams have finally been removed from Kytario. What does that mean for us?

1. Link management for a songbook is now part of the songbook. It's simpler and more logical. 🧠
2. Songbook visibility now has 3 options (Public/Hidden/Private), just like link-streams used to. If you want to share your songbook with friends but keep it hidden from other users, set the visibility to Hidden 😇.
3. Songbook name and description are taken from the description you set on the songbook itself (logical, yes). The previous implementation took the name and description from the link-stream.
4. Social media links have been moved into the project settings. You don't need to set links over again for each songbook if you have several. In the future we might 🤞 also see a „public” project page where you can write more about your project/band. 🎉
5. If you want to play from someone else's songbook and still be able to drive it live, simply create a copy of it. 👍

The link-stream names and descriptions (the ones you could edit in the link-stream admin) have been moved into songbooks. 🎉

From now on, every place in the app shows just the songbook name (until now the songbook name was internal-only and the link-stream name was displayed instead).

Social media links have been moved from link-streams into project settings. 😊

This move is the first step toward fully retiring link-streams. The individual pieces of data from link-streams will be split between songbooks and projects.

The goal is to simplify songbook management so that it makes more sense. 😉 Link-streams were originally introduced to make it easy to create several „live” broadcasts for a single songbook. But that feature wasn't really being used, and every songbook ended up with exactly one link-stream.

Social media links (Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, YouTube, website and photo gallery) have been moved into link-streams. 😊

The move unifies the management of all displayed meta information and at the same time lets the same songbook be used across several independent groups/projects ☀️.

At the same time the booklet settings in the songbook admin section have been removed. Instead, the booklet page is always shown, and its text is derived from the link-stream name or the songbook name (when shown in the admin section or printed into PDF). In the future we plan to redesign the booklets so that they become a full-fledged page with more information ✌️.

A new item has appeared in the admin section - projects. Every user now has their own project, which holds all the songs, songbooks, link-streams and playlists they've created. Projects can be shared between users ❤️, which makes it easy for several users to manage a single songbook without sharing one account/password 🔐.

In order to create songs (songbooks and the rest) within a project, you first have to switch to it. You do that from the main menu - click your name and the available projects show up in the dropdown (on phones the projects show up directly). Just click the project you want, and then you can create and manage all of its songs (songbooks and the rest) 💪.

You can create as many projects as you want, and share each one with as many people as you want. 😊

The individual permissions within a project work like this:

• Reader - compared to a user without permissions, also sees the project's private songs and songbooks
• Editor - on top of that, can edit all of the project's songs and songbooks
• Administrator - on top of that, can grant access to additional people in the project, and rename or delete it

Live mode can now be turned on and off straight from the songbook - no need to go into the admin section anymore. Just open the songbook and use the „Set live” button to pick the song you want. If you want to turn live mode off, open the list of songs and you'll see a „Turn off live stream” button.

As you've surely noticed, the admin section's look has changed a bit. The main upside is that you can now use the admin section on your phone, including editing songs directly from there. Before, that was only possible from desktops 🥳.

Each song can now have a performer assigned. It mainly serves to distinguish the performer from the author - many songs are played in a specific arrangement, and then arguments break out about whether it's played this way or that way. 🙂

If you switch the app language in the menu, the setting now sticks, and all other links and pages will open in that language too.

If you have Kytario installed as an app on a tablet or phone, you can now view private songbooks 🙂. Just head to the songbooks page and enter the URL path to the private songbook in the „Looking for a different songbook?” section.

After long-standing PDF issues, we finally managed to push out a fix. Songbook PDFs can now be compiled and the chords in them are visible 🙂.