# Program for playing music **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** music\ **Created:** [February 9, 2025, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085 "2025-02-09T15:58:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![mglambo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e8c25b/32.png) [@mglambo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mglambo)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2025, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/1 "2025-02-09T15:58:24Z")
I play guitar and sing in a three person band. I currently use Ultimate Guitar Pro on an Ipad for help with lyrics and chords onstage. It has a lot of glitches though. What other programs do folks use for this? I’m looking for something that I can easily edit incorrect chords etc. with and also be able to advance pages, perhaps with a foot pedal. Would it be difficult to transfer my 300 or so UGP songs to a new program? ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2025, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/2 "2025-02-09T22:31:27Z")
What do you need the program to do? Do you want it to be basically just an in-time teleprompter, or do you want it to play backing tracks as well? ---
**Author:** ![mglambo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e8c25b/32.png) [@mglambo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mglambo)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2025, 6:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/3 "2025-02-10T06:01:38Z")
Just prompter ---
**Author:** ![Eonwe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eonwe/32/240_2.png) [@Eonwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eonwe)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2025, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/4 "2025-02-10T06:53:29Z")
I’m not sure how about how UGP works and what kind of format the charts are in for exporting, but lots of folks use ForScore. OnSong is another interesting choice, and maybe has more of the chart creation functionality that UGP does? ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2025, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/5 "2025-02-10T15:53:15Z")
I’ve never used UGP, so I’m not familiar with its file format, or how easy it would be to migrate. Actually when I’ve needed an aide-memoire for gigs, I just go low tech and write or print a chord sheet on paper. At least it can’t crash or run out of battery… 🙂 In my experience a lot of the chord charts on the Internet are wrong anyway, or at least oversimplified… ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2025, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/6 "2025-02-10T16:02:57Z")
Forscore. That’s the cat’s meow for music these days, and it’s pretty nice that it still is a one-time purchase after all these years. I have thousands of songs in Forscore and use a page turner pedal to flip the pages as I play a bass line to my wife’s piano music. ---
**Author:** ![wguy123](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wguy123/32/3161_2.png) [@wguy123](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wguy123)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2025, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/7 "2025-02-10T18:28:14Z")
I see you can import PDFs of guitar tab. This might fit my needs. I do use Ultimate Guitar Pro, but I typically use the Guitar Pro application to create my own tabs. I’m currently outputting them to PDF and then printing to use in our practices. But, a tablet with a foot switch to advance would be awesome! ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2025, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/8 "2025-02-10T18:31:34Z")
We use onSong, which works pretty well, better than Ultimate Guitar for sure. Set up playlists, send them around, update chords and lyrics in the editor. The downside is that it’s iOS only, so everyone has to have an iPad. ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2025, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/9 "2025-02-10T19:01:48Z")
> [@wguy123](#): > > I see you can import PDFs of guitar tab. Forscore is absolutely focused on PDFs of sheet music. It provides a huge amount of functionality for shuffling pages around, making songs from a bookmark in a fat song book, and manually marking everything up with an Apple Pencil… …BUT, it is not a chord / tab editor tool, and it isn’t guitar-specific. It’s a more general tool that musicians everywhere use, whereas there are guitar-specific tools. I usually take my wife’s piano sheet music and scribble all over it with my Apple Pencil making all kinds of annotations for the bass line I will use. A super useful feature: you can Air Drop a song to a friend, and the app gives you the choice of the bare PDF, the annotated PDF, or the full Forscore file (which will have all of your keywords and metadata as well). When I send a song to my wife, my cat scratch notes go along for the ride. One cool app that any musician who plays jazz ought to have: iRealBook. That’s a neat app that is chord-based and comes with access to tons of jazz standards. It might be enough for some people’s needs. > [@RitterSport](#): > > it’s iOS only, so everyone has to have an iPad. Sadly, that is also the case with Forscore. At one point I considered whether I could move away from iOS products and immediately realized that the most important app I use is not available outside of iOS. ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2025, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/10 "2025-02-10T19:20:05Z")
I love forScore so much that a couple of months back I made a video about it. People ask me about from time to time so next time someone asks I’ll send them a link. In the video I seem to take forever to get around to actually showing the app, but I do demo its basic features as well as showing the page turner pedal I use as well as discussing the scanner app I use to produce the PDFs when I have dead-tree music. [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/oHyP_Fbpnes/maxresdefault.jpg "Cool tools...how working musicians get away from those heavy binders of music") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHyP_Fbpnes) ---
**Author:** ![wguy123](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wguy123/32/3161_2.png) [@wguy123](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wguy123)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2025, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/11 "2025-02-10T19:24:06Z")
Sounds like forScore will do what I want EXCEPT run on an Android. Thanks for all the info - I’ll watch your video later. ---
**Author:** ![wguy123](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wguy123/32/3161_2.png) [@wguy123](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wguy123)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2025, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/12 "2025-02-11T02:45:31Z")
Thanks for the video which was very informative! I am so ready to get rid of my binder of printed music. It is getting out of control. ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2025, 12:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/13 "2025-02-11T12:36:09Z")
Thanks! Hope it works out for you. ---
**Author:** ![wguy123](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wguy123/32/3161_2.png) [@wguy123](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wguy123)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2025, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/program-for-playing-music/1014085/14 "2025-03-14T01:15:45Z")
Circling back to this to thank you. I’ve been considering something to get away from my growing stack of paper bass tabs and now I’m jumping fully into using electronic versions and have a tablet holder/stand and a bluetooth page turner coming. I tried the facial cues with winking, etc and it wasn’t quick/responsive enough and I was quicker at poking the tablet with my finger. However, I play rock music and I’d rather use my foot. Eventually I’ll get to where I don’t need tab for a lot of songs, but we are up to 50 songs we play and I need some help. Thank you for your video and advice.