Moving your songbook to another app
6 min read
The real cost of changing songbook apps isn't the app — it's what you have built inside it: chords you corrected over years, songs pulled into your own key, the running order of a rehearsal. The good news is that most of it lives in portable formats. This guide covers which file carries what, what typically gets lost on the way, and how to switch without putting a single rehearsal at risk.
Take the backup first, then look at what it is
Every songbook app has an export or backup option. That's step one: take the backup and copy it somewhere else — the phone itself isn't enough, a cloud drive or a computer is better.
Then look at what the backup actually is, because that decides how portable it is. There are three possibilities: a single text file, a pile of song files sorted into folders, or one compressed (zip) package. Open a zip on a computer and what falls out tells you the format: .pro/.cho/.txt files inside are good news, while a single data file plus a hash means you're in an app-specific format.
Don't let the extension fool you. Apps invent their own extensions, but underneath it is usually an ordinary zip — try renaming it to .zip on a computer and opening it.
Which format carries what?
There aren't many formats in the songbook world, and most of them are close relatives. What separates them is how much information the file carries alongside the lyrics.
| Format | What it carries | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| ChordPro (.cho, .chopro, .pro, .crd) | Lyrics + inline chords; directives such as title, artist, key and tempo | The most portable format — it is plain text, so you can fix it by hand if you must |
| OnSong (.onsong) | Lyrics + chords + header lines | Very close to ChordPro; uses plain lines at the top of the file instead of directives |
| Plain text (.txt) | Lyrics + chord lines sitting above them | No metadata: key, tempo and capo get typed in again in the new app |
| A picture of the page | An image, not text: transposing, chord diagrams and search do not work | |
| App-specific backup (zip) | The whole library + setlists + settings | Opens only in its own app, or in one that knows how to read that format |
In practice the sturdiest route is this: if your old app can export ChordPro, take it. Its own zip backup carries more (setlists, settings), but then you have to find an app that reads it — everyone reads ChordPro.
What gets lost on the way?
Lyrics and chords almost always arrive. What goes missing is usually the personal layer around the song — and knowing that in advance beats discovering it at rehearsal.
- Drawings, highlights and handwritten notes on the page — practically no shared format carries these.
- Display settings: auto-scroll speeds, font size, theme.
- MIDI mappings, pedal assignments, click and metronome preferences.
- Tags, favourites and “recently played” — the organising layer, though some formats save it as folder names.
- Song order: if setlists come across, the order comes with them; if not, you rebuild the lists by hand.
Key, transpose and capo, on the other hand, usually survive — they sit in ChordPro directives or in the app's own backup. So how a song is played tends to arrive; how it looked does not.
Six steps before you move
Don't schedule the switch for the day of a rehearsal. This order is enough to keep the surprises off the stage.
- Take the backup, copy it somewhere second, and check its size — a few kilobytes usually means only the setlist names came out.
- Try the new app with a handful of songs first; don't throw the whole library at it.
- Pick difficult songs for the test: a title with accented characters, a song with a capo, and one PDF.
- Verify the key and capo one by one — this is the field that most often breaks quietly.
- Check that the setlists and their order came across.
- Don't delete the old app until at least one rehearsal has passed, and keep the backup file somewhere.
The first half hour after the import
The import finishing is not the job finishing. Compare the counts: how many songs were in the old app, how many are in the new one? A gap almost always comes from one of two things — a file format that couldn't be read, or two copies of the same song collapsing into one.
Then open the ten songs you play most and skim them: are the chords above the right syllable, are the section headings intact, do long lines wrap? If those ten hold, the rest holds.
One of your first moves in the new app should be taking your own backup. The move is done, but right now the only copy lives inside the new app. If you moved to Reperto, the backup section of the guide walks through how.
If you're moving to Reperto
Reperto recognises the format from the content rather than the file name, so your backup doesn't have to end in .reperto. Settings → Data → “Import (.reperto)” opens an unfiltered file picker: pick a single file, or use “Pick a folder” to take an entire folder at once.
- ChordPro, OnSong and plain-text files are read directly.
- Backups made of foldered song files are read too; the folder names become playlists.
- PDF charts arrive as display-only — transposing and chord diagrams do not apply to a PDF.
- Key, transpose, capo, tempo and your song notes come along whenever the file carries them.
The free version's 30-song limit applies to imports as well; moving a larger library in one piece needs Pro.
Once the move is done the real work starts: rebuild your setlists, settle the keys, get it ready for the stage. The step-by-step walkthrough is in the guide. If you have not settled on where to move yet, the comparison of OnSong alternatives on Android lays the options out side by side.