Fakebook Song Links

The Fakebook app imports songs in it's own proprietary format, from text files, ChordPro, ABC music files and from iRealbook/iRealb/iRealPro. But it also works very well with PDF and image files.

Importing and indexing PDF sheet music, chord progressions and lyrics from the web is as easy as point and click. Search for a song, click on the link and if the format is supported it will be added to the Fakebook database and opened automatically. To get you going, have a look at the excellent iRealb forum or some of the many PDF, ChordPro and ABC collections.



PDF

PDF is probably the most common format for storing and exchanging music. Most desktop notation programs will export PDF and scanning old music books, typeset or handwritten, often results in PDF files. As PDF is recognized as a reliable archive format, a lot of free music is available.

Pop and Jazz Books

The Fakebook batch import uses PDFB script files to automate indexing and naming of songs in PDF collections. Have a look at www.skrivarna.com for a description of the PDFB scripts to import your own PDF books, or check these examples:


The Real Book, 5th ed: 
A-B   C-D   E-G   H-I   J-L   M-O   P-S   T-W   Y+Extra

The Real Vocal Book:
A-B   C-D   E-H   I-L   M-O   P-S   T-Z



The Eb Real Book: 
A-B   C-D   E-G   H-I   J-L   M-O   P-S   T-W   Y+Extra



The Bb Real Book: 
A-B   C-D   E-G   H-I   J-L   M-O   P-S   T-W   Y+Extra



The Bass Real Book: 
A-B   C-D   E-G   H-I   J-L   M-O   P-S   T-W   Y+Extra


The Real Book vol 2: 
A-C   D-H   I-M   N-S   T-Y


The Eb Real Book vol 2: 
A-C   D-H   I-M   N-S   T-Y


The Bass Real Book vol 2: 
A-C   D-H   I-M   N-S   T-Y


The Real Book vol 3: 
A-E   F-L   M-S   T-Y


The Slickbook:
A-E   F-J   K-O   P-S   T-Z


The Slickbook 2:
A-K   L-P   Q-Z


Django Fakebook:
A-H   I-N   O-Y


The Creole Jazz Band Fakebook:
  II   III   IV 


The Creole Jazz Band Fakebook, Eb:
  II   III   IV 


The Creole Jazz Band Fakebook, Bb:
  II   III   IV 


The Creole Jazz Band Fakebook, F:
  II   III   IV 


The Creole Jazz Band Fakebook, Bass:
  II   III   IV 


The Real Book of Blues:
A-C   D-K   L-O   P-S   T-Y


Jazz LTD - Over 500 Tunes the Real Books Missed:
A-C   D-H   I-M   N-S   T-Z


The Colorado Cookbook - Tasty Tunes for the Musical Gourmet:
A-H   I-O   P-Z


The Firehouse Jazz Band - Dixieland Fake Book:
   II    III    IV 


The Great Gig Book - Blue Book (note that this PDF is huge and may take some time to download):
   II    III    IV 


557 Jazz Standards - Swing to Bop:
A-D   E-I   J-Q   R-Y


The Book:
   II    III    IV    










The script examples above uses The Internet Archive and other free/open sources to automatically download the books (of course, you may replace this URL with your own source). As the parsing process is still quite slow the PDFB files above handles parts of the books, instead of importing all at once. Just click one at a time (the download and parsing will take somewhere from a few minutes to several hours, depending on device), and when finished click the next. This way Fakebook will add and sort the songs correctly, creating a combined playlist for each book.

Classical


Note that on Android versions before 5.0 (Lollipop), the Fakebook PDF parser is quite slow. Downloading large collections or multi-page scores can take a lot of time (also, not all encodings are supported and the memory consumption may be a problem for some devices). However, thanks to this the viewer will quickly display the songs. That is, the slow part (PDF parsing) is done once and for all, to make sure displaying and changing songs in a performance is fast.



iRealbook Editor

There is a handy, web-based, editor for the iRealb format here. You can use this to write,edit and add new songs to the Fakebook database. If editing on a computer, mail or copy the link provided to your device. If editing on the phone or tablet, just click the link and Fakebook will open it!

iRealbook

The iRealb forum is the most comprehensive source for songs in the iRealbook format. Here you can find songs from your favorite artist or browse by genre.

Artists

Genres

However, note that there is no point to import the jazz 1200 playlists from the iRealb forum. Cleaned up and edited versions of all these jazz standards are already pre-loaded in Fakebook.




ChordPro

The ChordPro file format is simple and designed to store lyrics together with the chords. Searching the Internet you can find huge collections of songs in the ChordPro format, both free and for sale. Contrary to the chord progressions, the lyrics may be subject to copyright. Please respect this when importing ChordPro files.

Collections

Note that ChordPro files may be found with different extensions. Fakebook supports the most common: .chordpro, .chopro, .cho, .crd and .pro.


ABC

The ABC file format has a long history, is widely used and can represent most common musical expressions - not only chord progressions and song form. In fact, a lot of ABC files doesn't even include chords, just a melody line, and will thus be empty if imported to Fakebook.

Search engines

Collections