Songwriter's Drawer: Lyrics

Every unfinished song you have is in a different place. The melody is a voice memo called "New Recording 47". The words are in Notes. The chords are a photo of a napkin. Six months later the song is gone — not because you lost the pieces, but because you cannot tell which went together. Songwriter's Drawer keeps them together, one drawer, one page per song. FIVE WAYS IN, ALL UNDER TEN SECONDS Hold the button and sing. Type a line. Photograph a page from your notebook. Speak the words and have them written down. Or film yourself playing it. Whichever you pick, you are capturing seconds after opening the app — no splash screen, no loading, nothing to sign into. RECORDED FOR SINGING, NOT FOR PHONE CALLS Takes are AAC 192 kbps, 44.1 kHz, with echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain control off. Those three are tuned for a voice on a call and they flatten a sung note. Your phone's recorder leaves them on. This one does not. CHORDS OVER THE WORDS Tap a word to put a chord on it, the way a chord sheet reads, and drag it to move it. Transpose the song and it respells itself in the key it lands in. The chords belong to that draft, and the recorder shows you the sheet to sing from. YOUR HANDWRITING, TYPED BACK Photograph a page and get the words as text you can edit. Anything the reading was unsure of comes back marked, not invented — so you correct it rather than find a fluent line you never wrote. SING IT, GET THE WORDS Speak or sing and the take is transcribed. Keep a recording and you can ask for its words later too — correct them, then add them under your lyrics. The recording is always kept, whatever comes back: people hum, and a useless transcript over a perfect take is still a perfect take. SOUNDS, WORDS AND VIDEO ON ONE PAGE A song holds drafts, takes and clips. Film a run-through, or drop in a bounce from a laptop or an old voice memo, and it sits with everything else that song has been. NOTHING IS OVERWRITTEN Every lyric draft is saved as its own version, with the date, and any of them can be restored. Takes are never edited — a take is a moment, kept as it was sung. And no song is ever deleted: cleanup walks you through the ones that have gone quiet, one at a time, and the most that happens is you put one away in the archive. HEAR HOW FAR IT CAME Play a song's first take straight into its newest. The fastest way to tell whether months of work made it better. FIND THE LINE YOU HALF REMEMBER Search runs over every lyric and title in the drawer, instantly, on the phone. WRITES IN ANY DIRECTION Every field reads the direction of the text you typed, not the language of your phone, so a Hebrew or Arabic lyric right-aligns itself inside an English interface — line by line, in the same song. WORKS WITH NO SIGNAL The database is on your phone and it is the real one. Recording, filming, writing, chords, versions, playback and search all work in aeroplane mode. Three things need a connection, and only when you ask for them: reading a photographed page, writing down a take you spoke, and asking for the words on a take you kept. FREE, AND NO ACCOUNT Everything above is free and needs nobody's name. One tap builds a copy of the lot — the words, every take, every video — and hands it to you. That will always be free. PRO, IF YOU WANT THE BACKUP A subscription backs the songs, the words, the chords and the recordings up to our server, so a lost phone is not a lost drawer, and lets you send a song as a link that lasts a day. What lands at the other end is their own copy; opening one costs nothing and needs no account. Reading pages and writing down takes have a monthly allowance on the free plan, and the app says what is left before you spend any. WHAT WE NEVER SEE The app reports which features get used, and crashes when it crashes. Never a title, a lyric, a search, a file name, or what you called a take. It opens on your songs. Terms of use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/