How this thing works

A single screen for the three of us at practice. Tempo, key, lyrics with auto-scroll, and chord charts in one place. One person can press play and everyone else's screen follows along.

1. Open band.buford.dev, click Enter →.
2. Type the shared password (Buford has it). It's saved on your device for 30 days, so you only do this once per browser.

♫ Join the Learn playlist on Apple Music →one-tap join, opens Apple Music

1. Add the track to the shared Learn playlist on Apple Music. Anyone who's joined can add — it's our band playlist.
2. On the songs page, click Sync playlist in the top right. New tracks appear with album art, and we auto-fetch synced lyrics from LRCLIB when they exist for that song.

Coverage is good for popular songs. Instrumentals, deep cuts, and obscure live recordings often won't have synced lyrics — fall back to the manual editor below.

Click any song to open it. You'll see:

• A big play / pause button at the top. Tap any lyric line to jump to that moment. Reset goes back to 0:00.
• The active line is highlighted as the song progresses, and auto-scrolls into the center of the screen. Past lines dim, future lines stay full-color.
• Offset slider (right side, sm+ screens). If LRCLIB's timing is off (often by a second or two), drag the slider until it's right. Saves automatically — you only do it once per song.

See the badge next to the play button:

• I'LL LEAD · 2 — nobody is leading. Tap to take over.
• LEADING · 2 — that's you. Your play / pause / seek broadcasts to everyone else. Tap to release.
• FOLLOWING · 3 — someone else is leading and you're on the same song. Your screen mirrors theirs. Your controls are disabled until you take over or they release.

Joining is one tap. If you're anywhere in the app and someone is leading a song you're not on, a green strip appears at the top: "Now playing: Track Name — Artist · Join →". One click drops you into follower mode.

The app doesn't actually play audio — Spotify / Apple Music does that. The "play" button is just our shared lyric clock. So at practice: hit play in Apple Music and in the app at the same time.

We auto-fetch synced lyrics. Tempo, key, and chord charts are manual for now (the public APIs that would have given us those are blocked — long story). Click Edit on any song to fill them in:

• Tempo: type the BPM, or tap the Tap button on the beat — focus it and use spacebar if you'd rather use the keyboard.
• Key: e.g. Gm, C#, F.
• Lyrics: paste plain text or LRC format ([mm:ss.xx] prefix per line for synced karaoke). The editor has buttons to search LRCLIB and a few other lyric sites — much faster than typing the search yourself.
• Chords: paste ChordPro or any chord-over-lyrics format from Ultimate Guitar / Songsterr / wherever. The editor has search buttons for those too.

Ultimate Guitar blocks server-side scrapes (Cloudflare bot challenge). But your real browser already gets through fine, so we use a bookmarklet: a one-click bookmark that scrapes the page you're on and forwards the chord chart to this app's import flow.

1. Show your bookmarks bar in your browser. (Chrome / Edge: ⌘⇧B. Safari: ⌘⇧B too.)
2. Drag this link onto your bookmarks bar:★ Send to Band Practice
3. Open any Ultimate Guitar chord page (the URL ends with -chords-...), and click the bookmark. A new tab opens here with a song picker — pick which song to attach the chart to, click Attach, done.
4. The chart lands as-is. Open the song's Edit page and click ✨ Clean up paste with AI if it has site cruft, then 🔗 Merge chords into lyrics for the karaoke view.

Pages that are pure tab notation (not chord charts) won't work — the bookmarklet shows an alert. Songsterr / Chordify don't expose their data the same way; for those, copy-paste into the editor and hit the AI cleaner.

• On iPad, rotate to landscape during practice — lyrics get a wider column, easier to scan ahead.
• If you want to look at a different song without disturbing the leader, just click into it. You'll temporarily not be a follower; if you hit "I'll lead", you take over with that song.
• Notes about a song? Use Edit → there's a notes field for chord voicings, tempo bumps, weird intros, whatever.