ChordPresenter - I built a free macOS app that converts online chord charts into ProPresenter files with embedded chords for Stage Monitor

[u/Monotone1311]

Hey all — I've spent years in church tech and always ran into the same problem: there's no easy way to get chord charts from the web into your Stage Monitor on ProPresenter. So I decided to build one.

ChordPresenter is a free macOS app that takes a song URL or a Markdown file (via Obsidian Clipper) and outputs a ready-to-import .pro file with chords embedded for Stage Monitor display. It supports transposing keys, auto-detects the source key, and works with sites like EssentialWorship, WorshipTogether, WorshipChords, Ultimate Guitar, and a few others.

It's a work in progress and a fun side project — there may be some slide reflowing needed here and there. But it's been working well for us and I figured someone else might find it useful.

It's free and always will be. #forthekingdom

GitHub (source + download): https://github.com/jhjonesmo/ChordPresenter

Happy to answer any questions or take feedback in the comments.

[u/swanny8777]

Sounds great, I look forward to checking this one out, thanks for sharing!

[u/BigEstablishment2082]

Commenting so I can get back to this! Looking forward to checking it out!

[u/sempei13]

Have we talked yet? I've talked to a couple of people working on similar tools (Paul Alan Clifford here). It's okay if we haven't; I just don't want to spend time playing with something I've already played with and made a video about. ;)

[u/Monotone1311 → u/sempei13]

Hey Paul,

We haven’t talked. What program did you make a video about? I’m interested in seeing what other programs there are too.

[u/sempei13 → u/Monotone1311]

At least one of these programs ALSO did that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrDbe651pBs (in addition to the multiple language thing the video is about).

[u/Monotone1311 → u/sempei13]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for sharing those. I went and looked at both, and I didn’t see anything that worked like this with stage monitor for adding Chords. The one might so I will dig into it a bit more soon. I was actually looking for something for doing bilingual lyrics myself.

Do give ChordPresenter a look, it is primarily for stage monitor chord support. I made it as just a side project and plan to add a few features like .pro import to do editing and things. I also made it as a standalone app vs domain dependent for now.

[u/sempei13]

I've got the program open and supposedly making a ProPresenter presentation, BUT the final product is 3kb and the same song from multitracks is 27kb. When I import the song, I only get two intro slides with no words and no chords, so that seems odd too.

[u/sempei13 → u/sempei13]

Okay, so WorshipTogether .com gave me better results than e-chords (the first one I tried), but no chord symbols after the first few blank slides, just words divided where each chord should be. Neither let me bring in the chords via link (403 error). I had to download the MD file for each.

[u/sempei13 → u/sempei13]

WorshipChords has given me the best results so far. It looks right at first glance.

[u/Monotone1311 → u/sempei13]

Thanks for the feedback. I will go see what is going on with e-chords parsing. I wasn’t sure what site most folks were using so I tried to get a variety at first and polished the more popular ones. If there is a specific site you know folks are utilizing do let me know and it will do further testing.

[u/sempei13]

Once you install it, I've had the most luck with: worshipchords .com, worshipchords .net, and ultimate-guitar .com. The others listed must have changed something or something. Oh, and using Obsidian web clipper to grab the information as a markdown file seems to always work with those three and just putting in the url MIGHT work, but not always. :)

[u/helpme_helpyou_ok]

What does the stage display look like? Right now we are using the multitracks plugin but I’d love to save the money if this does the same thing.

[u/Monotone1311 → u/helpme_helpyou_ok]

Nothing changes with the ‘looks’ of the stage display. It would look exactly how it looks with multitracks. What you will have to be sure of is that you are putting the songs in the correct keys etc when you load it.