With Band-in-a-Box® 2019, the SongPicker has been redesigned!

• The completely redesigned window shows information for up to 50,000 songs.
• The song list build is much faster. Approximately 150 songs get added per second.
• A progress bar will appear if the song list build takes longer than 3 seconds.
• You can see the chord progression for the selected song in the list. You can copy and paste it to a text file.
• Many filters are available. You can filter the list by subfolders, genre, feel, time signature, style, songs with melody, soloist, lyrics, key signature, tempo range, and the year of file dates.
• You can search songs that have similar chord progressions and/or melody fragments.
• Hotkey! ss+enter opens the SongPicker, ss2+enter opens the Recently Played Songs, etc.

Learn more about the updates with our New Features Video - we've made it easy to find the section you'll need:

• 2:55 - New Feature: Redesigned SongPicker
• 21:58 - New Features: SongPicker Enhancements
• 41:10 - Now Over 10,600 Titles in SongPicker

You can also read all about the new SongPicker within our Online Band-in-a-Box® 2019 for Windows® Upgrade Manual.

The part of the new features video explaining the Custom Chord Progression filter is not quite right. The filter string C F typed in as a sample at 22:13 does not work as expected - the SongPicker shows an empty string with just two vertical lines ("***** list is filtered by this chord progression: | |"). Also the matched songs and also the matching bar#s are not correct.

There should be (either in online help or in the manual) information on how to correctly specify custom chord progressions (the PDF manual does not explain that). What to pay attention to when specifying a progression? Are vertical lines bar or chord separators? As an example entering C F G results in an error message. Is only the first chord of a bar relevant or all 4 possible chords? What chord extensions are relevant?

Q. Are vertical lines bar or chord separators

| Vertical lines are bar lines | C | F | would be two bars

/ are beat lines but needed unless you want to specific a chord on a certain beat where the chord durations are not equal | C / / Bb7 | puts the Bb7 in beat 4

|| is a double bar line indicating a bar line (and a new section)

This would be a 12 bar blues

| C | F | C | | F | | C F7 | Em7 A7 | Dm7 / / Ab7 | G7 | C A7 | Dm7 G7 |

You can see examples of his songs look like this in the songpicker window, just highlight a song and it shows at the bottom left. You can copy and paste this text too, so it’s easy to copy a few bars and use it as a template to search for that chord progressiion.

Peter, this clear example would be a good entry in Tips and Tricks.

I think I'm having trouble following.
What's been described is a 12 bar blues that appears to have three bars in one section, then one bar in another section, and then 6 bars in a third section.

Maybe they are blank bars that look the same as double bars? I wonder if a better delimiter could have been used, or if blank bars could have a character in them to show that they are not new sections ( a tilde perhaps ~ )

I read this as one bar of C, one bar of F, then two bars of C and two bars of F. The song totals 12 bars. Is that what you see?

Well, I can sort of see that, but I can also see how | | could be interpreted as follows:



Why not put some form of repeat character between the pipe characters if the chord is to be repeated, e.g. instead of:
| C | F | C | |
use:
| C | F | C | ~ |

That would make it more readable and remove ambiguity?

If there is at least one space its a separate bar line. We usually use lots of spaces, like this

 |  C        | F          | C         |           |
|| F         |            | C         | A7        |

Nice feature .. however, the thinny used fonts cannot be improved?

We use a courier font so that the text lines up. This is just for the preview

Here's how a typical song looks...

 1 || C                 |                   | D                 | G                |
 5  | C                 |                   | F                 | G                |
 9 !| C                 | F         G       | C                 | F         G      |
13  | Am                | F                 | Am        G       | F         G      |
17 || C                 |                   | D                 | G                |
21  | C                 |                   | F                 | G                |
25 !| C                 | F         G       | C                 | F         G      |
29  | Am                | F                 | Am        G       | F         G      |

btw) the default text copy includes bar#s, and also uses || for a 'a' substyle, and !| for a 'b' substyle
I can make a copy button that has options to remove the numbers, and always use ||

then it would look like this

|| C                 |                   | D                 | G                |
 | C                 |                   | F                 | G                |
|| C                 | F         G       | C                 | F         G      |
 | Am                | F                 | Am        G       | F         G      |
|| C                 |                   | D                 | G                |
 | C                 |                   | F                 | G                |
 | C                 | F         G       | C                 | F         G      |
 | Am                | F                 | Am        G       | F         G      |

Makes sense; i thought ~ is a standard repeat sign for handwritten chord leadsheets. Probably hard to program within BIAB.

How about % for repeated measure of chords? https://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/Finale2012Win/Content/Finale/Measure_repeat_signs.htm

Then it would look like this if there were minimal spaces

|| C | % | D | G |
| C | % | F | G |
|| C | F G | C | F G |
| Am | F | Am G | F G |
|| C | % | D | G |
| C | | F | G |
| C | F G | C | F G |
| Am | F | Am G | F G |

and this in courier font and lots of spaces.

|| C                 |       %           | D                 | G                |
 | C                 |       %           | F                 | G                |
|| C                 | F         G       | C                 | F         G      |
 | Am                | F                 | Am        G       | F         G      |
|| C                 |       %           | D                 | G                |
 | C                 |                   | F                 | G                |
 | C                 | F         G       | C                 | F         G      |
 | Am                | F                 | Am        G       | F         G      |

Looks more like the way i would hand-write out chord sequences for band rehearsals ...

Percent sign - yes. Looks more like a real repeat sign.

I agree, the percent sign would be a suitable choice. Much better than a <space> character.
(And at 4:30 AM I wasn't perhaps coming up with the best possible suggestion)

This chord text feature is exactly what I have needed to do charts with multiple songs on one page.

Question: Am I doing something wrong because I have to rebuild every time I hit the songpicker. Shouldn't it pull up the last list built and allow me to rebuild on my own timetable?

Peter,
Thanks, at least I understand now how the filter should work. But unfortunately it doesn't. There is clearly a real problem with the parser that incorrectly takes over the entered string. See screenshot:

Right, it looks like you’re missing a bar line at the start, and that confuses the parser.
Instead of

Gm7 C7 | F |
.... Put
| Gm7 C7 | F |

We can make the code add a bar line in situations like that, but for now, insuring that it starts with a bar line should fix it. And you’re right, one of the examples had that typo too. It’s likely a common thing that people would not put a bar line to start with so that would be a good fix,

Take a look here:

https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=507902#Post507902

Peter,
unfortunately, after inserting this leading bar line, it does not work properly. It now puts an empty bar in front and searches for songs containing the phrase – but only those which contain the phrase with a preceding "empty" bar!

I removed (as a try) the space between the leading | and the first chord Gm7 and got an error message! After clicking on the offered message "Would you like to fix those errors" nothing got fixed! Does that intentionally mean BiaB will automatically fix some easy typos or is it just a memo to correct the phrase (than this second message is not needed, as there already was an error message)? Also: I could just find this somewhat confusing line in the mentioned log file:
Error in chord  úšw ` € 21`: €Ñ, at bar 1
Instead of referring to the log file BiaB should highlight the the incorrect part of the input (and even better: make a proposal for a correction).

Searching by "Chord progression Matching Current Song (specify range of bars)" is also not working here.

Please, check the attached Video.

Cerio,

Thanks for the fix. Per you research I looked for a botched .MGU file by putting all the files in \BB directory in order by size and I found "Faded Love--bob wills.MGU (0 bytes)" which I renamed. At that point the rebuild worked correctly and the songpicker comes up from the last rebuild.

Tom Laskey

I'm glad it worked for you. I reported the issue to support, let's hope they will fix it in future updates, because it's going to affect more users, for sure.

Cerio,
"current song" refers to the song currently loaded in BiaB, not to the one you highlighted in the song list.
But it would be a good idea to add this function, because in the list you will find songs with a certain progression much faster than loading them into the program first.

Ok, I see. It was my fault, thanks for clarifying!