What the converter is doing

Almost every chord sheet on the internet is written the same way: a line of chord names, then the line of words underneath, with the chords held over the right syllable by a row of spaces. It reads perfectly and it survives nothing. Change the font, open it on a phone, let one long line wrap, and every chord slides away from the word it belonged to.

ChordPro fixes that by putting the chord inside the line, in square brackets, at the exact point where your hand changes:

[Am]The last bus home is [F]late
and [C]I am singing [G]anyway

The chord is now attached to a syllable instead of to a column, which is what lets an app transpose it, put a capo on it, or reflow it on a narrow screen without anything drifting. This converter reads the columns and writes the brackets.

It is a guess, and it will sometimes be wrong

Deciding which lines are chords and which are words is a heuristic, not a certainty — a line reading A could be a chord or the start of a sentence. The converter looks at whether every token on the line parses as a chord name, and it gets that right nearly always and not quite always.

So read the output before you keep it. That is the same reason the import screen inside Strumfolio shows a preview that stays editable rather than saving straight away: an escape hatch is part of the design, not an apology for it.

Nothing leaves your browser

The conversion happens on your own machine, in the page you are looking at. There is no upload, no account and no copy kept anywhere — which matters if what you are pasting is a song nobody has heard yet.

What to do with the result

A .chopro file is plain text. It opens in any editor, it goes into version control, and it is readable by a person twenty years from now on a device nobody has designed yet — which is the real argument for the format, and the subject of a longer piece on the blog.

If you want the chords to do something — transpose to the key you sing in, suggest a capo, scroll hands-free while you play — paste the same text into Strumfolio instead. It runs the same conversion this page just did, and then the song is a song rather than a file.