Guitarchive

An Obsidian starter vault for keeping your own guitar tab & chord archive — a personal songbook that organizes itself.

• Live index dashboard (Guitarchive.md): stat tiles, recently-added songs, and a searchable, sortable, filterable table of every song (live text search across song/artist/album/genre, plus tuning, capo, and favorites filters) with cover-art thumbnails and one-click favoriting.
• One-hotkey metadata enrichment: fill in Artist + Album on a song note, hit a hotkey, and pull release year, genre, label, track duration, cover art, and streaming links from MusicBrainz / Cover Art Archive.
• Artist pages that build themselves: every artist gets a page with song/album/favorite counts and a live table of their songs — created automatically when you enrich a song, with one-hotkey enrichment of their own: streaming links, a Wikipedia bio and one-line descriptor, the artist's photo, and a discography of their albums and EPs that flags the ones you already have songs from.
• Key detection: a "♪ Detect key from chords" link in the song header analyzes your chord sheet and writes the key to frontmatter (with the sounding key shown when a capo is set).
• Plain Markdown all the way down. Your archive is a folder of text files; every view is a query over frontmatter. No database, no lock-in.

Requirements

Two required community plugins, plus two optional ones (this vault ships with them pre-configured — you just install the ones you want):

Plugin	Required?	Purpose
Templater	Required	new-song template + the enrichment scripts
Datacore	Required	the live index, headers, and artist tables
Chord Sheets	Optional (recommended)	chord highlighting in ```chords blocks
Vextab	Optional	melody lines: standard notation + tablature from ```vextab blocks — the most involved to write, and entirely skippable for a chords-only vault

Song and artist notes carry a cssclasses frontmatter property (song-note / artist-note, written automatically by the templates), which pairs with the bundled CSS snippet to hide the raw properties panel in reading view — the custom header replaces it. No extra plugin needed; delete the snippet from Settings → CSS snippets if you'd rather see the properties panel.

If Datacore isn't in the community-plugin browser yet, install it via BRAT (blacksmithgu/datacore).

Setup

1. Clone this repo (or "Use this template" on GitHub, then clone yours).

2. In Obsidian: Open folder as vault → pick the cloned folder → trust and enable community plugins, installing the four above.

3. Turn on the new-song template. In Settings → Templater, enable Trigger Templater on new file creation and accept the confirmation. This is what makes the New Song template — the title prompt and the frontmatter scaffold — run when you create a note in Songs/. Recent Templater versions store this setting per device and put it behind a warning, so it can't be bundled with the vault: enable it on every machine where you use the vault. Leave the trigger mode on Folder templates. (The warning is generic — with this on, any new note containing Templater syntax runs on creation. That's fine for notes you write yourself; for tab files you import from elsewhere, use Adopt Song rather than dropping them straight into Songs/.)

4. Hotkeys come pre-bound (none collide with Obsidian defaults):

   Command	Key
   Enrich Song	Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+E
   Enrich Artist	Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+A
   Adopt Song	Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+M

   Change them in Settings → Hotkeys (search "Templater"). If you rebind, pick the Insert variant, not "Create new note from template" — Create spawns a new note instead of running against the open one. Sync Artist Pages is left unbound: it runs automatically as part of Enrich Song, and the command palette covers the rare manual run.

5. Optional but recommended: turn off Inline title in Settings → Appearance — song and artist notes render their own title in the header block, so the filename title just shows twice.

6. Open Guitarchive.md — it starts empty and fills in live as you add songs to Songs/.

Workflow

1. Create a note in Songs/ — you'll be prompted for the song title, and the frontmatter scaffold appears automatically. Importing an existing tab file (dragged in from outside Obsidian)? Open it and hit the Adopt Song hotkey — it merges in the full standard frontmatter without touching anything the note already has.
2. Fill in Artist (use Last, First for people — it matches MusicBrainz sort names) and Album, plus your tab/chords in the note body. If the tab came from somewhere, credit it: Originally Tabbed By (who transcribed the version you started from) and Tab Source (the URL) render as an attribution line in the song header — "originally" because your copy will likely evolve as you play it.
3. Keeping more than one take on the same song — a different tuning, a live arrangement, someone else's transcription? Give each its own note (disambiguate the filename: Hallelujah (Drop D).md), keep Song as the plain title, and describe the arrangement in the optional Version property. It shows under the title in the header and as a muted suffix in the index and artist tables, and the Songs stat still counts the song once. Minor variations (an alternate voicing for one section) don't need a second note — just add another section to the tab.
4. Enrich Song hotkey → confirms the album, fills metadata + cover + streaming links, inserts the header, and creates the artist's page if new. Archiving something MusicBrainz/Wikipedia won't have — your own songs, a friend's band, a local artist with no official release? Add Metadata Source: none to the song note. Enrichment still builds the header from whatever you fill in by hand, it just never queries MusicBrainz. This is per-note, not inherited — add the same property to the artist's own page too if you want its enrichment (Wikipedia bio, photo, discography) skipped as well.
5. On an artist page: Enrich Artist hotkey → saves the artist's streaming and homepage links from MusicBrainz, then pulls a Wikipedia bio into a ## Bio section and a one-line descriptor shown under the page title (with attribution; your ## Notes are never touched).

Mobile

Everything should work on Obsidian mobile — all four plugins support it, and the important actions are tappable, not hotkey-bound: song headers have ⟳ Enrich metadata and ♪ Detect key links, artist pages have ⟳ Enrich artist metadata, and the index table collapses to a compact two-column layout on phones. Two tips:

• Add Adopt Song to the mobile toolbar (Settings → Toolbar) — it's the one command without an in-note link, since it targets freshly imported notes that don't have a header yet.

Upgrading

New releases sometimes redesign the header and table blocks embedded in song and artist notes. Notes you already have don't pick that up on their own — a migration script rewrites the embedded block in each note. It ships in the release zip under tools/ and runs on plain Node.js, nothing to install beyond that.

1. Back up your vault first. The migration replaces each note's embedded datacorejsx block wholesale — if you've hand-customized a block inside a note, those edits are overwritten.

2. Extract the new release zip somewhere outside your vault.

3. Copy the new Templates/Scripts/ files (plus any other changed vault files the release notes name) over your vault's copies. Do this before migrating — the script reads the blocks from your vault's scripts, not from where it's run. Copy the whole Templates/Scripts/ folder, not just the two scripts you recognize: song and artist notes now load their header from song-header-view.jsx / artist-page-view.jsx in that folder at render time, so a note whose vault is missing those files shows a broken block.

4. From the extracted zip, preview what would change:

   node tools/migrate-blocks.js --dry-run /path/to/your/vault
   

   then run the same command without --dry-run to apply.

A note on copyright

This repo ships no song content — nothing in it reproduces a copyrighted work. Your own transcriptions of copyrighted songs are fine in your private vault, but think twice before publishing them in a public repo or fork — tabs and lyric sheets are derivative works. Cover art fetched at enrichment time comes from the Cover Art Archive and remains © its respective rights holders (the header shows an attribution caption and stores a CoverSource link for each image). By default enrichment downloads covers into Attachments/Covers/ so your archive doesn't depend on hot-links — set DOWNLOAD_COVERS = false at the top of Templates/Scripts/enrichSongNote.js if you'd rather store just the URL. Keep downloaded covers out of any public repo (add Attachments/ to your .gitignore if you publish your archive).

Credits

This vault stands on other people's excellent work:

• Obsidian — the platform it all lives in
• Datacore by Michael Brenan (blacksmithgu) — powers every live view here
• Templater by SilentVoid13 — powers all the automation
• Chord Sheets by Marcel Schaeben (olvidalo) — chord rendering
• Vextab by Luis Guzman — melody-line notation
• MusicBrainz and the Cover Art Archive (MetaBrainz Foundation, with the Internet Archive) — the open music metadata enrichment pulls from
• Wikipedia & Wikidata — artist bios (CC BY-SA)

License

MIT for everything in this repo (scripts, views, and templates). See LICENSE.