Multiple Song Books

evaldez

Hello,
I'm thinking of switching our congregation from EasySlides to OpenLP, mainly because OpenLP runs natively on macOS. There's one feature I've been looking for in OpenLP that I haven't found yet. And that's the separation of song books. So I've installed OpenLP and have successfully imported all the songs we have from EasySlides, however, they're all just bunched up under the Songs tab. I've edited a few of the songs to add what song book they're from (song number was imported already) but they're still just bunched up under the Songs tab. In EasySlides, there's a dropdown menu that lets you choose the song book. Is there something similar in OpenLP?

raoul

Hi, there isn't currently a grouping of songs, but you can do a search by songbook. It may not be what you're looking for, but maybe it's enough for now?

evaldez

Thanks for the reply raoul. I'll give that a try and see if that's a workaround that we can use. 

ve5yan

Hi,
Here what I have done:
I have 2 song books imported from VideoPsalm, one has less than 600 songs (Hymns of Life), the other on has less than 200 songs(My Song Book - a collection of song from various sources), I start the song number with 1001 instated of  1).

I use a short song book name for each one, I including a song number in the song title. e.g. "443 Thank you, Lord"; "536 Doxoloy"; "1039 My Best Friend"; "1103 My Tribute"

Within OpenLP song book
Hymns of Life #: 1 Hymn
....
Hymn of Life #: 443 Thank you, Lord
....
....
Hymn of Life #: 536 Doxoloy
.....
.....
My Song Book #: 1039 My Best Friend
.....
.....
My Song Book #: 1103 My Tribute

Then you can search by name or number, remember if you're asked to use "My Song book #103, do a search for 1103.
You can add another song starting with 2000 and 3000, etc etc.
I hope this will help.

ve5yan

Swanpastor

We do something similar, using a 3-letter code for the hymbook, eg:

TIS675 = Together in Song #675

CAH023 = Complete Anglican Hymns #23

This way they group within the hymn books. We also use separate Dropbox folders for each hymn book for backup.

We are also using Songs for Liturgy elements because we felt Custom Slides don't have sufficient formatting options. So for these we use a Lit code, eg:

Lit_01_Gathering_Lent refers to a short "chunk" of liturgy for which the season of Lent will have a different version than say the season of Easter. This means all our Lit chunks group together, also we can easily see all the different Lit_01 variations adjacent to one another.

We also use Songs for psalm "chunks". Each Sunday of the 3-year RCL cycle will have its own psalm. I am using a numbering system for the Sundays in the 3-year cycle, eg. coming Sunday is 022B (4th Sunday of Lent, Year B). So the title for the congregational psalm for this week is:

Psalm 107.1-3, 17-22 (022B)

Again, all the Psalm lections will group together and the user can easily see which one to select.

All this does make for a very full Songs folder! But it is easy to navigate and to back up different sections separately. As a suggestion to the devs it would be great to have a series of horizontal tabs within the same category so they would display side by side.

JohnM

@Swanpastor A few things to consider.

1. When editing a song, there is a place for songbooks and a place for category. Think of songbooks as what hymnal and categories as Lent and Easter.
2. In the Song library, you can change what is shown by using the dropdown arrow in the search box. if you select songbooks then all the songs are sorted by songbook first then by name....it isn't a perfect sort, but it tends to work.
3. You can select the category and again the songs are sorted by the category and then by the name.

Using the songbooks and categories is a good way to group what is seen in the songs library.

As a side note, the category can be imported, but the songbook can not be imported. This is frustrating to the group of users that use songbooks, but if you only edit the songs you need for a Sunday and do that every Sunday the work is spread out over a longer time, but is not so huge that is can't be done.

JohnM

@Swanpastor Sorry i said the wrong thing....replace category with Topics in my previous message! Sorry about the confusion.

TorontoKev

Hey! Would love better SONGBOOK segregation. We use OpenSong natively, want to switch.

We have books like our classic hymnbook (500 hymns), praise songs, kids camp songs, Christmas songs... there's a lot of them and if they were all mixed up it would be a painful list to pull from.