What? Thats like $70 AUS/ year.
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@sclay
Shane thatās right, not a happy bunny about it, makes you wonder how they can justify it, perhaps they hope you donāt find out.
Michael 
Songbook Pro looks promising - Iām getting pretty tired of fighting with Pages on iPadOS. A general purpose word processor and a touchscreen keyboard are not the best tools for creating lead sheets!
7 day free trial, then about $10 CDN to purchase - seems like a good value.
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Re song lyrics with chords, Iām using a free app called āJust Chordsā, (for iPhone/iPad iOS and macOS,) to create my own song books. I find it very useful for learning new songs.
Note: If inappropriate to refer to an āalternativeā song sheet app, would mods please remove my post.
With Just Chords, you can search the web, directly import the chords/lyrics and edit them in chordpro syntax, if you wish.
It has a lot of features including showing the songs chord diagrams, rhythm diagrams to make and show strumming patterns for the song, and itās easy to write chord sequence charts and tabs too.
It can transpose the chords in song to any key, or use the capo function to show transposed chords by capo position.
You can āplayā a song, have it scrolling on your device or send the display to a projector or Airplay device such as a TV.
There is a metronome option and background track capability to play along to songs.
Songs sheets can be organised in many ways including by artist. You can share your song books with other users.
The app also has good print to PDF feature. The developer is very responsive to feature requests or adding improvements.
If, like me, you canāt justify subscribing to apps such as ChordPro or Songbook then Just Chords is well worth a look.
Does Just Chords allow you to embed ā|ā characters to indicate measures that have more than one chord?
I find this essential for most of the lead sheets I create, and is the reason Iāve stayed with a conventional word processor rather than an app.
Update on Songbook Proā¦
I gave up on it because embedding ā|ā chars to mark measures with more than one chord was so tedious, and went back to Apple Pages.
But doing lead sheets on a touch screen was so unpleasant that I ended up buying a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for my iPad.
Yes you can. I like to add the chord and then indicate how many beats for each measure where a chord change might occur after two beats. So above the lyric you could have
[G / / / ] [C / G / ] [D / / / ]
indicating 4 beats on G then 2 on C 2 on G and D for 4 beats.
You can for example add slashes in lyrics to show bar changes.
Something I put together for learning Down on the Corner by CCR. Attachment shows some options I used but you could choose other ways to show it too.
Thanks, that looks promising.
Is it easy to embed those special chars, or do you have to use formatting codes?
You could do that in Songbook Pro by surrounding with [|] IIRC, but it was very tedious, and there was a bug that would delete all your formatting if you typed the wrong character.
Have you tried Apple Pencil? I find it really good for placing the cursor when editing. You can also long press the spacebar on the onscreen keyboard to move the cursor all around.
No itās pretty easy. For Chords just tap the [chord] icon and the brackets are inserted with cursor position between to type the chord letter and you can type dots or slashes for beats.
| | characters are reserved for creating fixed space characters for example tabs with timing shown above.
For strumming patterns you can use | D U D> - DU | or tap the insert rythm diagram to paste in chordpro syntax then just add the DU-X for down arrow, up arrow, miss, string mute and so on.
Some screen shots in edit mode shows the syntax. Itās pretty straightforward and editing an import is simple and quick.
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Have not tried the pencil, but know the long press space bar trick.
Spent a lot of time trying to work with the touch screen limitations, but all those years working on Windows PCs have left deep grooves (or scars 
) in my muscle memory, and find itās just much easier to use keyboard and mouse.
I drag and drop lyrics quite often, and find that also works much better.
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The rythm syntax above in edit mode looks like this (up down arrows and accents)
in normal mode. Pretty standard symbol use of < > for accents, x for string muting but you can use other combinations of your own such as a pm after the chord which would appear above chord to indicate Palm mute. You can see the chord diagrams too which again is handy if learning. You can select different chord fingering by tapping on the chord diagram.
For a free app itās really very good.
Thanksā¦really appreciate your very detailed helpā¦Iāll probably give it a try.
No worries. If you decide to try it and need a hand with working any features out just post a reply and Iāll see if I can help. You can also message the developer from within the app. He has implemented a lot of users feature requests.
Hi stitch, thanks for this certainly rings a bell and like Justin does take me back to the good old days so to speak.
cheers
Rick168
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Hello - regarding the apps mentioned earlier, is there any Android equivalents?
Hi Doug, in addition to the very useful replies you have received to your post I would like to share the ways around the issues with the chord charts with lyrics that I have used for myself.
When learning Los peces en el rio, I copied by hand the lyrics and the notes. When learning Blowinā In The Wind I copied by hand the lyrics and the duration of the notes that I borrowed from a piano score. For these two songs it was the best way for me to understand how to play them (and sing them).
When revisiting the version in Spanish of the Last Kiss to play it at my first JGC OM I found that there were some issues with the chords and the placement of the chord changes (thanks to JG lessons). This time I asked help to my brother and sent him the page of the chord songbook and a spreadsheet with the way I would fit the lyrics in the bars and where I thought the chord changes should be. He replied with a corrected and improved spreadsheet. I did some changes to it and this is what I had in front of me when playing at the OM (and practicing for it). Hopefully thereās no copyright issues with this. 
For the following OM I made a spreadsheet, but used it only for practicing the chord changes and singing with the muted strings. For the actual playing and singing I used sheet music that was synced with the backing track.
Although it can be a lot of work involved in putting the chords and lyrics on a piece of paper, or in a word processor, or in an spreadsheet, or in any of the aforementioned software, l it may actually save time in the long term as in the process the guitar player can get a better knowledge of the song or piece and itās displayed in a way that makes sense for him or her.
About not having THE strumming pattern indicated, before JG I would have skipped the song. Now I would first try a simple pattern, DDDD or DUDUDUDU for 4/4 time signature, and from there I would try other patterns until finding one that sounds good for me, not necessarily THE strumming pattern.