Software to make grilles

wim · December 2020

iReal pro is pretty good but IMO they left a lot on the table, for iReal you also need the app, which is annoying. And $14 on a mac. A better model is probably just to have a good and highly functional website, that works even in a mobile browser (like how soundslice did it). In an ideal world there's not even any need for an app, you just use a Chrome bookmark.

Your project looks like a good start and I think there is opportunity here to do some stuff that iReal leaves to be desired. Particularly around community curation, collaboratively editing and voting. On iReal, if a chart is bad, you might edit to fix a chord here or there and save your own version, but then that's the end of the story. You got the better chord but nobody else has it, they all see the same problem. To use a software analogy, it's like you've fixed a bug in your own fork but you never bothered to get that merged back upstream.

With collaboratively edited and voted charts, they will hopefully all end up "peer reviewed" and high quality over time. You can see this happens already in open source software / wikipedia / stack overflow models to name a few examples.

Some little UI suggestions that will be easy to fix immediately:

search box (react js?)
use slug urls rather than exposing song ids, e.g. https://django.fakebook.ninja/public/12 should be https://django.fakebook.ninja/minor-swing
don't show "Please select a Song on the left." when there is already a song selected
don't show "None" at the bottom of charts when whatever field that is from is blanked

And, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but the site ain't too pretty - with a some more modern js bootstrap and html/css spit and polish I think it could be made to look a lot slicker!

V-dub · December 2020

Geez Wim, I'd had to be on the other end of one of your code reviews :)

These are all really interesting ideas BTW. A peer reviewed chart site would be awesome. Maybe I'll add that to my list of projects I'll never finish.

djangology · January 2021

Latest update. I just created a standalone grille bar generator service. Just hit it will your web browser at the URL, like this example:

https://chord-bars.azurewebsites.net/api/bar?scale=3&bg=33f&fg=d8e&text=[Em7b5,Am6,'B\u0394',E]&font=Pacaembu&style=0

Here is a screenshot of what it can create. This is the first draft:

So, you can make your own grid charts with a simple HTML page downloading the images.

I'll keep this service running forever since it is free to host it. Just ping me if something doesn't work. Also, I'll do improvements over time.

Instructions:

style - a number between 0 and 3. 0=PLAIN, 1=BOLD, 2=ITALIC, 3=BOLD-ITALIC
fg - foreground color, either 6 or 3 character color format string
bg - background color, either 6 or 3 character color format string
scale - size of overall image, a number 1-5
text - an array of 1, 2, or 4 chords in square bracket. be careful with formatting.
font - some font names wont work but a lot do