It’s been five months since I last released Chordious, my free app to generate beautiful chord diagrams for stringed instruments. Version 0.4.0 brought the first public iteration of the graphical chord designer, greatly simplifying your ability to create diagrams to meet your own style needs.
The problem was, you still needed to know what chords you wanted to make diagrams for. The biggest ask then was for an integrated chord finder.
It took me some time to bone-up on music theory, and then figure out exactly how to implement a chord finder in an efficient way. Other apps have done it before, but it’s a non-trivial problem to solve, and so I wanted as efficient, complete, and flexible solution as possible.
It took a few months to plumb the whole thing through, but Chordious 0.6.0 now features an integrated chord finder! Check out these lovely screenshots:
Now you can simply pick your instrument, tuning and search parameters and then search for chords! Right now you’re limited to the instruments, tunings, and chord types that I’ve entered- to start I just added some of the more popular banjo, guitar, and ukulele tunings. In the future I plan on making the list user editable. Same thing with the chord qualities- right now you’re limited to major, minor, augmented, diminished, 7th, 6th, and some of their variants.
Though the chord finder is the meat of the release, there are also plenty of other new features as well, including:
- Export: Export images as PNG or JPG for easier use
- Diagrams: Strings can be “muted” by setting them to -1 (and they show as x’s above the string)
- Diagrams: Strings left open can optionally have an O at the top of the diagram
- Diagrams: If Barre is set to -1, the diagram will make an “educated guess” where the barre should go
- Diagrams: Barres can now be partial (only crossing the minimum number of marks) or cross the whole fret
- Diagrams: If Baseline is set to 1, don’t show the 1 fret number (just remove the nut line, great for creating blank diagrams)
- Bug fix: Fixed an issue where the app kept running in the background when you closed with an unsaved document open
- Lots of other clean-up and code reduction
For download links, check out my Chordious page, or the Chordious project page at Launchpad. You’ll find links for both the binaries and the source. Be sure to download the right binaries for your system (Windows or Linux / Mac OS X), and follow the installation instructions carefully.
Happy strumming!
/jon
Note: Chordious is still beta software, so please be sure to backup any ChordDocuments and diagrams you create. If you run into issues, let me know! I’ve still got plenty of room on the road-map to version 1.0.
Update (02/16/2014): I finally fixed the StartChordious.cmd script to work on Windows XP, so I’ve updated the 0.6.0 windows binaries zip to include the fix.
Jon Thysell 