Controlling an external program to advance through song charts

Gig Performer on Windows
1

I would like to map a button on my MIDI controller to advance through song charts. I currently have all of my song charts in MS Word including screenshots of scores for some parts. Gig Performers chordpro format is too limiting for me.

I don’t see anythng in the forums about this but a quick Google search says it should be possible to send a keystroke to MS Word using GPScript and Powershell. Ideally I would like to advance to the next heading but there is no keystroke for that. There is a keystroke, however, for advnacing to the next page (Ctrl-PgDwn). I could make that work.

Before I dive headlong into this, has anyone here done this already? Or maybe somebody can suggest a better way?

Thanks!

2

My suggestion. Save that Word file as PDF.
Then use this tool: PDFToGPChordPro

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3

I will try this. Does this need to be done on one song at a time? If so it will be very time consuming but maybe worth it if the results are good.

4

Well, it’s worth converting your word docs to PDF as built-in support for pdf files is on our roadmap.

The PdfToChordPro basically generates images from a pdf file and then creates the ChordPro commands to load those images into the GP ChordPro viewer.

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5

There is also Mobile Sheets. Gig Performer can send Pitch Bend messages to it to select specific pages within a given song. I find it to be a deterministic solution.

Next and previous page commands work, but the risk is that you get out of sync. Moving a percentage through a score can fail when scaling changes. Mobile Sheet handles PDFs and other formats and has a full database for organizing materials.

As always, the right solution depends on getting the whole system to work together. This is just another tool that might help.

6

MobileSheets looks amazing. Clearly it is designed to do this sort of thing. For $15.99 it is definitely worth trying out.

Having said that, the PDFToGPChordPro solution looks like it may do the trick for me. I can load my PDF scores and configure MIDI controls for the “Next Song Part” and “Previous Song Part” system actions. The only thing I don’t see is a system action to open the “Song Lyric/Chords” window. Am I missing something or is there another way to do that? I see the option for “Keep On Top” but then it is on top of EVERYTHING, so you you need to close it to reveal other windows and you still need a way to open it back up again with a MIDI control. Another good solution would be to have the “Song Lyric/Chords” content in the right pane of the Setlists view instead of the selected rackspace, but I don’t see an option for that either. Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

7

You can use a widget and this script to open the Lyrics/Chords window:

var BUTTON : Widget

On WidgetValueChanged (newValue : double) from BUTTON
  if newValue == 1.0 then
    ShowChordProWindow(true)
  else 
    ShowChordProWindow(false)
  end
end

Needless to say, you can then map that widget to your MIDI controller.

–

Alternatively, you have this awesome extension that speaks 5 languages!

Link: Lyrics/Chords Extension

Enjoy.

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