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, complete with an optional one-hotkey Wikipedia bio.
• 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

Four community plugins (this vault ships with them pre-configured — you just need to install them):

Plugin	Purpose
Templater	new-song template + the enrichment scripts
Datacore	the live index, headers, and artist tables
Chord Sheets	chord highlighting in ```chords blocks (optional but recommended)
Vextab	melody lines: standard notation + tablature rendered from ```vextab blocks (optional — chords-only vaults can skip it)

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. 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.

4. 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. Enrich Song hotkey → confirms the album, fills metadata + cover + streaming links, inserts the header, and creates the artist's page if new. Tracking your own unpublished music? Add Metadata Source: none to the song (and your artist page) — enrichment keeps doing the local work (header, artist page) but never queries MusicBrainz.
4. On an artist page: Enrich Artist hotkey → pulls a Wikipedia bio into a ## Bio section (with attribution; your ## Notes are never touched).

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.