songpress 1.9.0rc3

Songpress is a free, easy to use song typeset program for Windows and Linux, that generates high-quality songbooks.

Songpress is a free, easy to use song typeset program for Windows and Linux, that generates high-quality songbooks.

Songpress is focused on song formatting. Once your song is ready, you can copy-paste it into your favorite program, to give your songbook the look you like the most.

Windows Installation

To install Songpress on Windows, we provide a network installer that downloads and installs the latest available version of Songpress.

Songpress is distributed through PyPI, the standard repository for Python packages. The network installer uses uv to:

1. Check whether a recent version of Python is already installed on your system. If not, the installer will download a local version of Python dedicated to Songpress.
2. Download and install Songpress along with all its dependencies (locally).

All installed files are contained in a single folder within your Program Files directory, allowing Songpress to be cleanly uninstalled using its own uninstaller.

Linux Installation

On Linux, you can install Songpress using pipx:

pipx install songpress

Alternatively, you can use uv:

uv tool install songpress

The installation process may take several minutes, as the installer needs to download and compile the wxPython and wxWidgets libraries. Once installed, you can run Songpress by typing:

songpress

You can create a start menu (application menu) shortcut by executing:

songpress --create-shortcuts

To upgrade Songpress on Linux, run:

pipx upgrade songpress

Highlights

• Produce high-quality guitar scores (text and chords)
• Easy to learn, quick to use
• You can paste formatted songs into any Linux and Windows application, to layout your songbook with maximum flexibility (Affinity, Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, Microsoft Publisher, Inkscape etc.)
• Export formatted songs to PNG and HTML (web pages and snippets)
• Chord transposition with automatic key detection
• Chord simplification for beginner guitarists: determine the easiest key to play your song, and transpose it automatically
• Support several chord notations: American (C, D, E), Italian (Do, Re, Mi), French, German and Portuguese; notation conversion
• Support Chordpro and Tab (i.e. two-line) chord formats
• Clean up dirty songs with spurious blank lines (such as songs copied and pasted from web pages) and not homogeneous chord notations

Learn more at http://www.skeed.it/songpress

Known Issues

Linux: SVG export and display scaling

When the system display scaling factor is not set to 1, the SVG output produced by Copy as Image may be incorrectly formatted. This is a known issue in the current wxPython release. The underlying problem has already been fixed upstream in wxWidgets and will be resolved automatically once the next version of wxPython becomes available.