"This creation of yours is brilliant."
Alan sent that line last week. He plays in two bands, Flyte Risk DSM and AKBand, and he'd been on SongbookPro for quite some time. Two weeks ago he started moving his entire setup to Fretlist. Two bands' worth of songs and setlists, intact.
This is what happened.
Why he was looking
Alan wasn't a SongbookPro hater. What pushed him away was an accumulation of specific failures he'd dealt with long enough to know weren't getting fixed.
The group features were essentially broken. Without timely support from the admin, syncing with bandmates was unreliable at best. And the disconnect behavior was its own special frustration: SBP would stay connected overnight, no problem, right up until you tried to do something that required an online connection. Then it would drop immediately. The UG integration in the Folder section had the same problem. Leave it running, looks fine, touch it and it falls over.
As he put it: "There is zero feedback or support from SBP."
Leaving a tool is rarely about one big thing. It's about realizing nobody's there to fix the small ones.
The first import, and a bug
Alan dropped his two .sbpbackup files into Fretlist's importer. The first try, songs from one band ended up in the other band's setlists. Not great.
He sent me the files. The bug was a fingerprint collision: two backups, same internal song IDs, no way to tell them apart. I shipped a fix that gave each backup its own unique fingerprint. A few days later he tried again.
His reply that night:
"SUCCESS!!!!!! I just uploaded 10 sets to Fretlist and it appears they all imported without issue."
Ten setlists, both bands, songs intact. Keys, capos, tempos all preserved.
Then a different bug
A week later Alan came back with another problem. Play Mode autoscroll wasn't working on his Windows laptops.
Turned out his devices were reporting scroll positions in fractions of a pixel (a display scaling thing), and Fretlist was getting confused by the fractional values. At low speeds it could never make progress. First fix shipped.
Then Alan came back with a seven-device test matrix. Different Windows tablets, an Android, all on the same song, each needing different minimum scroll speeds. Clear signal the fix wasn't complete. Another round of digging, another fix shipped. Scroll now behaves consistently across his entire device range.
While I was in there I also shipped column view in Play Mode, so songs can fit on one screen without scrolling at all. For Alan that's the better answer to his original problem.
Pulling songs in from Ultimate Guitar
There's no direct UG integration in Fretlist, and there won't be one any time soon. Direct integration with that site comes with legal considerations I'm not ready to take on.
But there's a workaround that works really well: open the song on UG, Cmd+A to select everything on the page, then paste into Fretlist's importer. The importer reads the page, pulls out chords and lyrics intact, and captures the metadata too: title, artist, capo, tuning. Alan tried it on three songs:
"That rocks. Easily imported 3 songs from UG."
The full how-to is at fretlist.com/docs/import-from-ultimate-guitar.
What's still being figured out
Alan wanted to share his library with bandmates. The full Band Plan, where multiple accounts log into the same library, is in design but not shipped. So I walked him through the share-link workaround: open a setlist, click Share, toggle "share all songs," send the link via WhatsApp.
His reply: "I think that will work for now." He sent the link to one of his mates, and it worked.
If you're considering the switch
.sbpbackupimport handles multi-band libraries. Songs, setlists, keys, capos, tempos come across.- If you have multiple bands, do them as separate imports. They stay separate inside Fretlist.
- UG songs come in by selecting all on the page and pasting into the importer.
- After a big import, the Matching Titles tool tidies up duplicates you can decide to merge or delete.
- Sharing with bandmates today works via share links. Full Band Plan is on the roadmap.
The procedural guide is at fretlist.com/docs/import-from-songbookpro. That's the how. This post is the why and what.
How Fretlist gets built
Two bugs surfaced through Alan. Two fixes shipped (the second one in two rounds). One new feature shipped on top. Sharing with bandmates works.
That's the loop. No support team, no triage queue. Just one person reading every email and shipping fixes when the report is concrete.
If you switch from SongbookPro and find something I haven't seen yet, the same thing happens. Drop your .sbpbackup files in at fretlist.com when you're ready. Free during Early Access.
— Dear John