AutoAcordes

AutoAcordes is an Obsidian plugin for building a personal songbook (lyrics + chords) to learn guitar. Paste a chord sheet from a website, press Save, and it stores a clean note in your vault — organized by artist and written in ChordPro, ready to be read with the Chord Sheets plugin.

It understands both Spanish (DO RE MI FA SOL LA SI) and English (A B C D E F G) chord notation on input, including slash chords (SI7/FA#) and alternates (SI7*), and always writes English notation to the note.

[!IMPORTANT] AutoAcordes is a companion to Chord Sheets, not a replacement for it. AutoAcordes only writes the notes; Chord Sheets is what renders them — chord diagrams, transposition, auto-scroll. Without it installed you will see plain text with brackets. See Setting up Chord Sheets.

Why ChordPro

Chords written above the lyrics only line up while the text is not re-wrapped — on a phone they drift out of place and the sheet becomes unreadable. ChordPro instead anchors each chord to the syllable it belongs to:

[C]Todo llega y todo [G]pasa como un espejismo

Chord Sheets renders that back as chords-above-lyrics on a wide screen, and re-flows it correctly on a narrow one — one single source, both views.

Setting up Chord Sheets

1. Install Chord Sheets (Settings → Community plugins → Browse → Chord Sheets).
2. Turn on "Display inline/ChordPro-style chords over lyrics" in its settings — this is what gives you the classic chords-above-lyrics look on desktop. Without it the notes render as text with brackets.
3. On mobile, read the notes in Reading mode; Live Preview does not re-flow them well.

Features

• 📋 Paste & clean — paste a chord sheet copied from a website; the plugin strips the page clutter (ratings, "submitted by", menus, fingering diagrams, IDs…).
• 🧠 Auto-detect metadata — fills in Artist, Song, and Key/Capo/Genre when present (from markdown links or, in plain text, the first two lines).
• 🎼 ChordPro output — one ```chords block per song, chords anchored to the syllable.
• 🔤 Notation conversion — Spanish DO RE MI… is converted to English C D E…, which is what Chord Sheets needs to recognize chords and draw diagrams.
• 🗂️ Auto-organized — creates Acordes/<Artist>/<Song>.md and links each song to its artist and to a central hub note (great with the Dataview plugin).
• 🔁 Format reconstruction — handles chords written above the lyrics and chords written on the same line as the lyrics (a common copy artifact), realigning them.
• 🎸 Tabs preserved — tablature lines are kept verbatim, with their column alignment.
• 📱 Works on desktop and mobile Obsidian.
• 🪶 Zero dependencies, no build step — a single hand-written main.js.

Installation

Status: currently distributed through BRAT. A submission to the official Community Plugins directory is planned for a future version.

Via BRAT (recommended)

1. Install the BRAT community plugin (Settings → Community plugins → Browse → BRAT).
2. Run "BRAT: Add a beta plugin" and enter Xadow0/obsidian-autoacordes.
3. Enable AutoAcordes in Settings → Community plugins. BRAT will keep it auto-updated.

Manual

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy them to <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/autoacordes/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Don't forget to install Chord Sheets as well — see Setting up Chord Sheets.

Usage

1. Click the 🎵 ribbon icon or run the command "Añadir canción (acordes)".
2. Paste the chord sheet into the big text box. Artist/Song/Key/Capo are filled in automatically when detected (and stay editable).
3. Check the live preview and press Guardar (Save).

Output format

A saved note looks like this (outer fence shown with four backticks so the inner code block is visible):

---
artista: "[[Los Delinquentes]]"
cancion: "[[A la luz del Lorenzo]]"
tono: Em
capo: 0
formato: chordpro
---
# 🎵 A la luz del Lorenzo – [[Los Delinquentes]]

[[Música]]

## 🎶 Letra + [[Acordes]]

```chords
[Estribillo]
[A7]To el mundo va del [B7]cuento de yo me lo pago...
```

Format rules

These are the conventions AutoAcordes writes, and the ones to preserve if you edit a note by hand:

Rule	Why
Chords in English notation (C, F#m, B7/F#)	Chord Sheets parses with tonal, which does not know DO/RE/MI. Watch out: capitalized Do is silently read as D diminished.
A chord alone on its line is written without brackets (G, not [G])	A line containing only […] is read as a section header. Bare chords are still detected and get their diagram.
Section headers are a line containing only [Estribillo]	That is how Chord Sheets marks sections.
Tablature is left verbatim	Column alignment is meaningful there and must not be re-flowed.

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
Base folder	Acordes	Where artist folders are created.
Hub note	Música	Note every song links to (leave empty to disable).

How it works

The core is a small parser that turns chords-above-lyrics into inline ChordPro chords:

1. Each text line is classified as chords, lyric, section label, tab or blank (chord tokens are matched with a notation-aware regex).
2. A chord line is paired with the lyric line below it; each chord is placed at the start of the word sitting under its column, and Spanish notation is converted to English.
3. Pasted sheets where chords and lyrics share a line are split back into two lines first.
4. Unicode spaces ( , etc.) are normalized so columns line up.

Migrating from 1.x

Version 1.x wrote two sections per note: a "versión móvil" with **[C]** inline chords and a desktop section with the raw chords-above-lyrics sheet in a plain code block. Version 2 writes a single ```chords block instead — see CHANGELOG.

Notes created with 1.x are not migrated automatically and keep working as plain text. The 1.x code is preserved on the v1-legacy branch if you need to go back to it.

Development

This plugin is intentionally dependency-free: the shipped main.js is the source — there is no bundler or transpile step. To work on it, edit main.js and reload Obsidian (Ctrl/Cmd+R). Check it still parses with node --check main.js.

main.js         # plugin code (parser + UI)
styles.css      # modal styles
manifest.json   # plugin metadata
versions.json   # plugin version -> minimum Obsidian version

License

MIT © Xadow0