Song Annotations

JustChords lets you mark up any song with your own handwritten notes, typed reminders and attached links or recordings, laid directly on top of the chords or sheet music. These live in a single Notes & Drawing layer that floats over the song and stays put every time you open it. The layer holds three kinds of content: freehand drawing, typed sticky notes, and sticky attachments (web links, audio tracks and voice memos).

Your markings are saved together with the song. You can also keep a different set of markings for the same song inside a particular setlist, so a song can look one way in your library and another way in a specific gig.

Opening Notes & Drawing

You enter the annotation mode while a song is on screen in the Song Viewer. There are three ways in:

Open the ⋯ (more) menu and choose Notes & Drawing.
Tap the Notes & Drawing button in the floating menu (the pencil-and-note icon).
If you use an Apple Pencil, double-tap the barrel while a song is on screen to jump straight into drawing.

While the layer is open the song stays fully visible underneath, and a toolbar appears with everything you need to draw, add notes and attach items.

Leaving the layer

Done saves your changes and returns to the song.
The back arrow closes the layer without saving.

Drawing

Drawing lets you scribble freehand over the song with an Apple Pencil or your finger — circle a tricky bar, mark a repeat, write a cue in your own hand.

Choosing a pen or eraser

On Mac, open the colour menu in the toolbar and pick a pen colour. Twelve colours are available: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, gray, brown, cyan, indigo, mint and pink. The default pen is red.
Choose Eraser from the same menu to rub out strokes.
On iPad and iPhone, the standard Apple tool picker appears, where you can switch pens, colours, width and the eraser directly.

Erasing

The eraser removes whole strokes rather than scrubbing away part of a line, so a single touch clears the stroke you tap.

Long or multi-page songs

Drawing works on long, scrolling songs and on multi-page sheet music. Each page keeps its own drawing, and markings you make over sheet-music (PDF) pages are re-scaled automatically if you later view the page at a different size, so they always line up with the music.

Sticky notes

Sticky notes are small coloured cards of typed text you drop onto the song — a reminder, a lyric change, a count-in.

Adding and editing a note

Tap Add in the toolbar to drop a new note onto the song.
An empty note shows "Double-tap to edit". Double-tap it to type.
Single-tap a note to select it; double-tap to edit its text.

Moving and resizing

Drag the body of a note to move it anywhere on the page.
When a note is selected, drag any of the four corner handles to resize it.

Colour

Selecting a note reveals a colour picker offering six sticky-note colours: pink, cyan, green, yellow, orange and red. Notes are drawn semi-transparent so the song underneath still shows through.

MIDI actions (advanced)

If MIDI is enabled in Settings, a selected sticky note also offers an action menu. You can bind a MIDI message from your library to a note so that tapping or double-tapping it sends that message during a performance — for example to switch a patch or trigger a backing device. Notes with an action attached show a small button indicator.

Sticky attachments

Sticky attachments are cards that carry something to open or play rather than text. Add one from the toolbar's Add attachment menu, which offers three kinds:

Web link

Holds a web address. Tap the pencil button to type or edit the URL (JustChords adds https:// for you if you leave off the prefix).
Tap the link icon to open the page in your browser.

Audio track

Plays a track from Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, a local file, a URL, or an audio unit.
Tap the music button to choose the source, then tap play on the card to hear it. Track titles are filled in automatically where available.

Voice memo

Records a short note in your own voice, stored with the song.
Tap the microphone to record, then play to hear it back. Once recorded, tap the pencil to rename it.

Like sticky notes, attachments can be dragged to reposition and resized with their corner handles when selected. Attachments are interactive tools for on-screen use, so they do not appear when a song is printed or exported to PDF.

Deleting

To remove a single item, select the note or attachment and use Delete.
With nothing selected, Delete opens a menu to clear content in bulk: Delete all Notes & Drawings, Delete all Notes, Delete all Drawings or Delete all Attachments (only the options that apply are shown).

Showing, hiding and where markings are saved

Your markings save automatically when you tap Done, and reappear whenever you open the song.
Use the Show toggle for Notes & Drawing in the song's display preferences to hide the layer temporarily without deleting anything. This can be set for all songs or overridden per song.
Markings are stored with the song in your library. When a setlist keeps separate settings for a song, that setlist can hold its own independent markings, leaving the library copy untouched.

Printing

Drawings and sticky notes are included when you print or export a song to PDF (unless the layer is hidden), and are scaled to fit the printed page. Sticky attachments are left out, since links, audio and voice memos have no meaning on paper.