Drum charts for real kits. Read charts on your desktop or tablet, right next to your kit.
DrumFord X is a flat-screen drum chart visualizer. It reads the open .rlrr chart format and pulls community-uploaded charts from paradb.net, rendering the notes scrolling down a canvas highway you can read on a regular monitor or tablet — no headset, no controllers, just the chart and your kit.
Built by Fordnet.
🎬 Watch the 30-second demo video (plays inline on GitHub when you click)
- 🎯 A read-only chart player. Notes scroll down lanes synced to the original song audio. No scoring, no input detection, no drumming required — it's a visualization tool to read along on a real kit.
- 🥁 Reads the open
.rlrrchart format. Parses every community chart, including multi-difficulty songs. - 🌐 Integrated Community Charts browser. Search ~6,000 community charts from paradb.net, one-tap download, auto-import.
- ⚙️ Customizable. Reorder lanes, recolor notes, tune note thickness / glow / grid brightness / hit-line pulse / highway speed. Add or remove lanes (CHINA, SPLASH, HH-FOOT). Per-instrument routing for unusual charts.
- 🎚️ Sync tooling. Per-song speed (0.5×–1.5×), user-configurable sync offset (±2000 ms), metronome with BPM-event awareness, audio-output-latency-compensated timing.
- 💻 Two platforms today. Windows .exe (Electron) and Android APK (Capacitor wrapper). Same renderer code, same feature set.
- ❌ Not a game. It doesn't track drumming, doesn't score you, doesn't detect input. It's a chart you read while you play your own kit.
- ❌ Not a chart authoring tool. It plays charts you've already authored or downloaded — it doesn't make new ones.
- ❌ Independent project. DrumFord X plays the open
.rlrrdrum-chart format and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the makers of that format. - ❌ Not in any app store. Downloads are direct from the GitHub releases page below.
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| Your library — sortable, filterable, cover-art aware | Community Charts — ~6,000 community charts, instant client-side search |
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| Kit Setup — customize lanes, colors, shapes, and tuning sliders | Highway during playback — Ace of Spades, Hard difficulty |
- Download
drumford-x-v0.1.0-win-x64.zipfrom the latest release - Right-click → Extract All to a folder of your choice (e.g.
C:\Apps\DrumFord X\) - Double-click
DrumFord X.exeto launch - First-time warning: Windows SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" because this is an unsigned debug build. Click "More info" → "Run anyway". This is expected for an alpha — code signing requires a paid certificate we haven't bothered with yet.
To uninstall, just delete the folder. No registry changes, no system bloat.
- Download
drumford-x-v0.1.0-android.apkfrom the latest release - On your Android device, open the APK file via your file manager or browser downloads
- Android will say "This type of file can harm your device" — that's the generic warning for non-Play-Store APKs. Tap Install anyway (or "Install from this source" once you grant permission).
- Samsung note: if you have a Galaxy device, you may need to disable Auto Blocker first (Settings → Security and privacy → Auto Blocker → OFF). Samsung blocks sideloaded APKs by default.
- Launch DrumFord X from your app drawer.
The APK is debug-signed, which is fine for sideloading but means it won't ever be on the Play Store from this signing key.
After first launch, you'll land on an empty library. Two ways to get songs in:
- Community Charts tab — the easiest path. Loads a local cache of every public chart from paradb.net, one-tap downloads straight into your library.
- Import a song zip (Android) or drag a folder onto the app (Windows) — for charts you already have.
| 🎼 Chart playback | Scroll-down highway, kick as full-width bar, customizable color per lane, accent / ghost note styling, hollow cymbals |
| 🥁 Hit-line pulse | Visual feedback when triggering notes cross the hit line (configurable per-lane) |
| 📚 Library | Sort by Date Added / Title / Artist / Complexity / Duration. Filter by difficulty. |
| 🌐 Community Charts browser | Local catalog of all ~6,000 community charts from paradb.net. Instant client-side search. Sort by Most Popular / Trending (7d / 30d) / Newest / Complexity / A→Z. Compact list view + grid view. |
| 🎛️ Kit Setup | Per-lane reorder, color, kind (drum / cymbal / full-width), enable/disable, pulse-trigger, custom-name. Optional presets: CHINA, SPLASH, HH-FOOT. Advanced instrument-class remapping. |
| 🎚️ Live tuning | Highway speed, note thickness, glow intensity, grid brightness, hit-line pulse strength. All sliders, all persistent. |
| ⏱️ Sync controls | Per-song speed multiplier (0.5×–1.5×), per-user sync offset (±2000 ms, click-to-type), metronome with full BPM-event awareness |
| 🎨 Visual polish | Custom FordNetAi branding, dark-navy color palette, hit-line cyan glow, lane background gradients, beat grid (downbeats stronger) |
| ⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts | Space = play/pause, Esc = close any modal |
| 🪟 Frameless window | Custom title bar on Windows. Standard Android UI on tablet. |
- Audio latency on tablet: Android's audio pipeline has higher latency than desktop. Use the Offset control to compensate (typically +50–100 ms on a tablet).
- No drag-and-drop on Android: Replaced with a "Import Zip file" picker. Community Charts is the primary import path.
- No code signing: Windows SmartScreen + Android "Install Unknown Apps" warnings. Both are click-through but cosmetically rough.
- No chart authoring: This is a player, not an editor. Author charts in a dedicated editor, then import them here.
- Open hi-hat detection: Not yet differentiated visually from closed hi-hat. The chart authoring community typically uses velocity to encode this; DrumFord X renders accent-velocity notes larger + with a glow, so well-charted songs already get visual distinction "for free."
- Tempo changes: Fully supported on the highway grid; tempo changes within a song re-anchor the beat grid correctly.
Open an issue: https://github.com/FordNet-AI/drumford-x/issues
Useful info to include:
- Platform (Windows or Android)
- App version (visible on the About tab)
- Song you were playing (link to the chart on paradb.net)
- What happened vs what you expected
- Browser console / adb logcat output if you can grab it
This is alpha — please report rough edges. That's literally why we shared.
- Node.js 22+ (nodejs.org)
- Git
git clone https://github.com/FordNet-AI/drumford-x
cd drumford-x
npm install
npm run dev:electron
Or on Windows the one-shot launcher: start.bat.
npm run build
npx electron-builder --dir # produces release/win-unpacked/
The unpacked .exe sits at release/win-unpacked/DrumFord X.exe. To wrap as an NSIS installer you'd need Windows Developer Mode enabled (or Admin powershell) due to a symlink-extraction quirk in electron-builder. For alpha distribution the unpacked folder zipped is fine.
The android-capacitor branch has the Capacitor wrapper. CI builds the APK on every push to that branch and uploads it as an Actions artifact.
git checkout android-capacitor
npm install
npm run android:open # opens Android Studio (needs JDK 21 + Android SDK)
# In Android Studio: Build → Build APK(s)
Easier path: download the APK from the latest release.
npm run icon # regenerates public/icon.ico (Windows)
npm run android:icons # regenerates android/app/src/main/res/mipmap-*/* (Android)
Electron + Capacitor · React 19 · Vite 7 · TypeScript · Tailwind v4 · Zustand 5 · Web Audio API · IndexedDB (idb-keyval) · adm-zip + jszip
electron/ Electron main process (Windows shell, IPC, chart API, zip extraction)
src/
components/ React UI
highway/ Canvas renderer + lane logic
library/ Song cards, Community Charts browser, import
setup/ Kit Setup, Quick Tuner popover, Add-Lane modal
controls/ Transport bar widgets
stores/ Zustand stores (player, library, kit, ui)
lib/ Pure modules (parser, default kit, song storage, catalog cache, capacitor bridge)
types/ Shared types
android/ Capacitor Android shell (only on android-capacitor branch)
public/ Static assets (icon, Fordnet logo)
scripts/ Build helpers
docs/ rlrrschema.json — the .rlrr chart format spec, for reference
.github/ CI workflow (auto-builds Android APK)
Fordnet is the indie label behind DrumFord X. Built by Tim — drummer, builder, and recovering Quicken user — out of a desire to read drum charts on a flat screen next to a real kit, instead of strapping on a headset every time.
- paradb.net — the community-run chart database DrumFord X integrates with for one-click downloads.
- Every chart author — every drummer who has ever taken the time to chart a song. This whole experience runs on your work.
MIT. See LICENSE.
Trademark notice: DrumFord X and Fordnet are trademarks of Fordnet. The MIT license grants permission to use the source code; it does not grant permission to use these names or the Fordnet logo on derivative works. If you fork the project, please rename your fork.
DrumFord X is an independent project that plays the open .rlrr drum-chart format and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the makers of that format. See NOTICE.md for the full statement of what this project does and doesn't redistribute.