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. π‘
The {X} mark must be written on every line, even when nothing is sung 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. π
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 π .
Because the reason Kytario came to life was the low quality of song content on other platforms. π₯² 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. π
Content quality is Kytario's number one priority. πͺ Good content makes your song accessible to other musicians and helps not just you, but the whole community β€οΈ.
Kytario has a brand-new feature - the Project map πΊοΈ. Projects (guitar circles, bands, groups around the campfire) can now be discovered and shown to other people. π
Show yourself to the world β€οΈ - 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 π€ - the more projects on the map, the better you can see how much is going on nearby and where things are alive. π»
The map only shows the projects you mark as public yourself. Private groups stay hidden π.
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 π.
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. π€«
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. π
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. πͺ
... so a songbook can now hold up to 2,016 songs! π That's a glorious 14 pages in the song list, 500 hours of playing and 300,000 words! π
If even that's not enough, let us know - and please include some advice on how to remember that many songs π₯²π».
When editing or creating a song you can now paste in text with chords in any format π, whether from another website or just as plain text, and let our AI automatically convert it into the Kytario format. π‘
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. π
You can now search not just by name and author, but also directly in song lyrics! π
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. πͺ
Search ignores chords and other markup in the song content, so you're searching the plain text. It also works without diacritics - just type βkrasnaβ and βKrΓ‘snΓ‘β will show up too. π
So next time you can't remember the song title, but you do remember it had something about the βmoonβ - just type it in and see what comes up. π
Something you've been missing β€οΈ. The songbook can now be scrolled not only with an external βremoteβ 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, π or at a small, spontaneous gig where nobody has a remote, and someone with their hands free (e.g. the singer π€) takes over. πͺ
Kytario is going beyond borders π! The platform's primary domain is now Kytario.com. Don't worry, old links will keep working - they'll redirect to the new domain. π
Alongside this change comes the ability to switch between German and English notation. π₯³ You can flip it via the button in the songbook's bottom expand menu.
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. πͺ
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 π.
Technical constraints have forced us to limit the maximum number of songs in a songbook to exactly 1,152 songs. π₯²
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 π.
Hand on heart - who can actually play that many songs? π
The number 1,152 was chosen, among other reasons, because that's exactly how many songs fit onto 8 sheets of the song index π.
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 βblastβ everyone around with light (which looks bad in photos π).
You've finally got it - Kytario has its own documentation! π₯³ 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 π.
A new Sort button has appeared in the songbook admin section π. If you've been sorting your songbook by hand until now, you can now do it with one (or two π) 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. π§
The admin section - the one you used to get to via the βAdminβ button - has been merged with the public part of the site. π
Browsing the site is now simpler, you won't have to keep jumping back and forth πΈ.
Songbooks will now automatically have their βlive modeβ turned off after 8 hours of inactivity π.
This small improvement ensures that songbooks remain more navigable (for people and for search engines) after you've finished playing your event π.
After a drawn-out series of changes, link-streams have finally been removed from Kytario. What does that mean for us?
The link-stream names and descriptions (the ones you could edit in the link-stream admin) have been moved into songbooks. π
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. π
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. π Link-streams were originally introduced to make it easy to create several βliveβ 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. π
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 βοΈ.οΈ
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 I plan to redesign the booklets so that they become a full-fledged page with more information βοΈ.
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 β€οΈ, which makes it easy for several users to manage a single songbook without sharing one account/password π.
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) πͺ.
You can create as many projects as you want, and share each one with as many people as you want. π
The individual permissions within a project work like this:
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 βSet liveβ 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 βTurn off live streamβ 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 π₯³.
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. π
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 π. Just head to the songbooks page and enter the URL path to the private songbook in the βLooking for a different songbook?β section.
After long-standing PDF issues, I finally managed to push out a fix. Songbook PDFs can now be compiled and the chords in them are visible π.
