Somebody sent you songs

Open a .giganome file

A bandmate shared a song, or a whole running order, straight from their phone. The file holds the title, the artist, and the tempo, meter, and division each tune needs — and nothing else.

It opens in Giganome, a metronome for iPhone and Apple Watch. Once you have the app, tap the file and Giganome shows you what is arriving and lets you decide what to keep. Nothing is saved until you say so.

What Giganome is

A metronome you can feel. Set a tempo, a time signature, and a subdivision, and it taps the beat on your wrist or in your pocket — with a firmer tap on the downbeat, so you know where the bar is without looking.

It also keeps a whole band on one tempo. One musician reads out six digits, everyone else types them in, and from then on anyone can change the tempo or call the next song for everybody. It works in a room with no signal, and there is no account to make.

Is the file safe to open?

It is a small text file listing songs and their tempos. It contains no personal information about whoever sent it, nothing about their phone, and no code of any kind. You can open it in any text editor and read the whole thing.

Giganome collects no data about you either. The privacy policy says so at greater length, and it is short.

Already have the app?

Then tapping the file should have opened it. If it did not, make sure Giganome is installed on the device holding the file — a file received on a Mac or an Android phone cannot open on an iPhone until it gets there. Sending it again over Messages or AirDrop is usually the quickest fix.

If it still will not open, write to support@giganome.com and say how the file reached you. Support covers the other things people ask about.