Collaboration
Collaborator tabs
On a shared song every writer gets their own lyric tab in their own colour, plus a Master tab for the agreed version.
Share a song and the editor grows a row of tabs. Each writer gets one, and everyone can see everyone else's.
Nobody types over anybody. You write in your tab, they write in theirs, and the version you both agree on is assembled deliberately in a third one.
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- 1Your own tab, marked (You)
- 2A co-writer. The star means they own the song
- 3The agreed version
Reading the tabs#
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Your name (You) | Your own tab. The only one you can type in. |
| A star beside a name | That writer owns the song. |
| A filled dot | They are in the song right now. |
| An outlined dot | They are not. |
| Master | The agreed version. See The Master. |
Colours are assigned, not chosen. The owner is purple and everyone else takes the next colour in the list, which is the same colour shown against their name on the Collaborators screen.
What is yours and what is shared#
Your tab is yours. Co-writers can read it but cannot edit it. To get your words into someone else's hands you send them, which is covered in Sending lines to a co-writer.
Section headers take your colour. Write a Bridge in your tab and the header is your colour rather than the app's purple, so a glance at a tab tells you whose work it is.
The Scratchpad stays private. Nobody else can see it, on any song. It is the right place for a line you are not ready to show.
Recordings are shared. Audio attached to the song is visible to everyone on it, and each tab shows the takes belonging to that writer as a strip of chips. When a writer has more takes than fit, the strip ends in a ⋯ +3.
Tap a chip and a small player appears without leaving the tab, with skip back, play and pause, skip forward, and a close button. You can listen to how a co-writer sang their verse while reading the words they wrote for it, which is the point of putting the two side by side.
What changes in the toolbar#
A shared song swaps two things.
- Mailbox appears, carrying a count when someone has sent you lines.
- Collaborators moves off the toolbar and into the ⋯ menu, because the mailbox takes its place.
If you are removed, or you leave#
You keep a personal copy of the song under a new title, so nothing you wrote is lost. You stop seeing the shared version and anything written in it afterwards.