SongShow Plus is a worship presentation software package use by many churches to present song lyrics (and many other things) on screens. When moving to a different software package it may be needed to get your song lyrics out into some other format.

This project will parse and extract data from SongShow Plus *.sbsong files, you can find sample files in this repo if you need to see what this can work with. It has only been tested with SongShow Plus 7 files as far as I know. I need test files from newer versions to be sure. The song files I test against do not contain a version number in them, so perhaps these files are standard across all versions of SongShow Plus, I am not sure. If you have any song files you are able and willing to share with me, I would love to try them!

This project is used by my LyricConverter project which can convert your song lyric files between many common formats. If you need to convert some songs to another existing format I encourage you to check that project out first.

npm install songshowplus-parser --save

Simply import and create a new instance of SongShowPlus, then pass the contents of a SSP file as a Buffer or an ArrayBuffer to the .parse() method. Basically you can just pass in the raw output from reading the file without converting it to a string first. If you are using a FileReader be sure to use the readAsArrayBuffer(yourFile) method

import { readFile } from 'fs';
import { SongShowPlus } from 'songshowplus-parser';
import { ISongShowPlusSong } from 'songshowplus-parser/dist/main/model'; //Add only if you need the type defs

const sspParser = new SongShowPlus();

readFile('Be Near.sbsong', (contents): void => {
  const song: ISongShowPlusSong = sspParser.parse(contents);
  console.log(song);
});

const { readFile } = require('fs');
const { SongShowPlus } = require('songshowplus-parser');

const sspParser = new SongShowPlus();

readFile('Be Near.sbsong', (contents) => {
  const song = sspParser.parse(contents);
  console.log(song);
});

Note that for any properties the parser is unable to find an empty string or empty array will be returned instead. This way all properties are always the types they are supposed to be, nothing is nullable or optional on the returned object.

{
  id: '0707',
  title: 'Be Near',
  author: 'Barnard, Shane',
  copyright: '2003 Waiting Room Music',
  ccli: '4090362',
  key: 'B',
  comments: '',
  verseOrder: '',
  songBook: '',
  songNumber: '',
  topics: ['Longing', 'Security'],
  lyricSections: [
    {
      title: 'Chorus 1',
      lyrics: 'Be near O God\nBe near O God of us\nYour nearness is to us our good\nBe near O God\nBe near O God of us\nYour nearness is to us our good\nOur good',
    },
    { title: 'Other', lyrics: '' },
    {
      title: 'Verse 1',
      lyrics: "You are all big and small\nBeautiful\nAnd wonderful\nTo trust in grace through faith\nBut I'm asking to taste",
    },
    {
      title: 'Verse 2',
      lyrics: 'For dark is light to You\nDepths are height to You\nFar is near\nBut Lord I need to hear from You',
    },
    {
      title: 'Verse 3',
      lyrics: 'Your fullness is mine\nRevelation divine\nBut oh to taste\nTo know much more than a page\nTo feel Your embrace',
    },
    {
      title: 'Verse 4',
      lyrics: 'For dark is light to You\nDepths are height to You\nFar is near\nBut Lord I need to hear from You',
    },
    {
      title: 'Ending',
      lyrics: 'My good',
    },
  ],
}

SongShow Plus files are in a binary format, and I never would have been able to figure out the meaning of if it wasn't for this SSP parser written in python by Matt Hamann (@mhamann) which described the format and structure of these files. I have no idea how he figured it out, but I'm glad he did!