Printing, exporting and sharing

Getting a setlist onto paper, exporting your songbook, and sharing a set with the rest of the band.

Export ChordPro saves a song's chart as a .chordpro text file. For a setlist it bundles every chart into a single .zip, numbered in running order, and that zip is also SetForge's setlist-sharing format — see Sharing a setlist below.

A song's recording link travels with the ChordPro file, so a chart you export and re-import keeps it, as does one sent to a bandmate in a setlist zip. Other ChordPro apps ignore it rather than choking on it. It doesn't appear on a PDF — a printed chart has nowhere useful to put a link.

Export PDF opens your browser's print dialog with a clean black-on-white rendering, so you save to PDF using the browser's own print-to-PDF. Multi-song setlists page-break between songs, which makes this the route to a paper set for anyone in the group still working off sheets.

Download backup (Settings) takes everything in your account as a zip — your songs as ChordPro files you can open in any other app, plus the data SetForge needs to put it all back. Restore from backup reads it back.

Sharing a setlist

Export → ChordPro (zip) on a setlist gives you one file that works two ways. Anyone can open the charts inside it in any ChordPro app, and SetForge can read the whole setlist back — running order, per-song keys and notes included. Send it however you'd send any file.

To read one in, go to Songbook → Setlists and use Import setlist… above the list.

Three things worth knowing about what comes back:

• Importing always gives you a new setlist, even if you already have one with that name — the second one is called Friday Set (imported). Nothing you already had is changed or overwritten.
• Songs you already own aren't duplicated. If the file contains A Long December and your songbook already has it, the imported setlist points at your copy. Only songs genuinely new to you get added, and the message after the import tells you how many of each.
• Capo settings, annotations and practice counts don't travel. Those are yours rather than the setlist's, so a set you send to a bandmate arrives without your fingering choices imposed on it. Keys set on the setlist do travel, since those are the group's decision, not one player's. So do recording links — a link to the version the group is working from is worth everyone having.

The same file won't work in the songbook importer, and a full account backup won't work here — both cases tell you which screen you want.