Category: Perfect Guitar Song Book Tip Of The Week

PGSongBook and the iRig BlueBoard

I recently realized that I had promised to write a post describing how IK Multimedia’s iRig Blueboard works together with PerfectGuitarSongBook way back when version 1.47 was newly released.
As I somehow forgot to actually publish this post, I figured I’d post it now.

PGSongBook supported bluetooth and USB foot pedals almost since its very beginning. PGSongBook has a main focus on providing maximum control over the content without having to interrupt playing your music, and supporting foot pedals are a part of that experience.
However, PGSongBook’s foot pedal support never actually felt 100% complete until the iRig BlueBoard was released. As previous pedals only came with two buttons, control was limited and merely reduced to being able to scroll up and down within a song.

iRig BlueBoard

With the iRig BlueBoard, this has changed radically:
Using the board’s four buttons, you can actually navigate throughout the whole application only with the BlueBoard, without having to touch the screen. In order to achieve this full control, PGSongBook dynamically maps the board’s buttons to match the current screen:

(All mappings below assume you are using the BlueBoard in Program Change Mode from Bank 001 to Bank 004 on Channel 01)

In the songs, artists, playlists or playlists songs list, the following mapping is used:
A: Up
B: Down
C: Back / Switches to next tab
D: Enter

In the song screen the mapping is as follows:
A: Up
B: Down
C: Back / Back in playlist
D: Forth in playlist

If an additional volume pedal is connected to the BlueBoard, it can be used to control the absolute position in a list.

You can get more information on the iRig BlueBoard here

Please feel free to write in the comments below or send me an email if you have questions regarding PGSongBook or the iRig BlueBoard integration.

How to change editor text size

PGSongBook allows you to easily adjust the font size of the built-in editor to your needs:

Just tap the screen with two fingers, keep touching it and move your fingers away from each other.
This movement is also called “Pinching” and works in many other applications as well.

Go to last visited URL

If you close and reopen PGSongBook’s web browser a new web search gets started. What if you want to go back to the web site you visited before closing the browser?

Just swipe over the URL bar of the browser from left to right:

Search URLs

With Perfect Guitar Song Book, you can easily starts web searches from the app’s add song dialog. Thus, you just have to set a URL, that contains placeholders for title and/or artist as start URL of the built-in web browser in the app’s settings.

Example:

www.google.com/search?q=%a+%t+chords

This starts a google search with the song’s artist, title and the word “chords” (If you have entered artist and title in the add song screen before)

Placeholders:
%a     will be replaced with the artist
%t      will be replaced with the title

Examples for search URLs:
Just copy an URL from here and paste into the start URL field in PGSongBook’s settings.

911tabs: 

http://www.911tabs.com/search.php?search=%t&type=song  

Ultimate Guitar: 

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/search.php?search_type=title&value=%t  

Guitaretab: 

http://www.guitaretab.com/fetch/?type=tab&query=%t  

Azchords: 

http://search.azchords.com/cgi-bin/azseek.cgi?q=%t&Search=Go%2521  

Tabrobot: 

http://www.tabrobot.com/cgi-bin/tsearch.pl?mode=name&terms=%t&submit=Go%21  

YourChords: 

http://www.yourchords.com/index.php?page=search&search_artist=%a&search_songtitle=%t&search_button=Search&search_button.x=0&search_button.y=0&search_button=Search

Scrolling to the top of a song

If you want to quickly scroll to the top of a song, this little trick can always help you: Just tap on the time in the status bar of the iOS.

The red circle marks the place where you should tap.

This will work for any list of PGSongbook and for most of the lists in any other app, as well.