SongBeamer and OpenSong

connan · Post by **connan** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 1:45 am

I have been using OpenSong for around 2 years now and love its simplicity and ease of use, but have wanted more features.

I read in one of the OpenSong forums about SongBeamer and am surprisingly amazed at the quality of the product and its abilities, even running the DEMO.

Is development and quality support ongoing?
Is there an easy way to import songs from OpenSong?

I look forward to purchasing SongBeamer soon!

Nicholas

Post by **Sebastian** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 7:44 am

Yes, we're actively developing and supporting SongBeamer.

You can import the bibles from OpenSong. I don't have an importer for the songs yet, but I'm quite sure that we can create one.

connan · Post by **connan** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 9:11 am

Thanks.

Any ideas on a timeframe for an OpenSong song import tool? (This is the one thing stopping me from sending some money through straight away!!)

Post by **Sebastian** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 9:16 am

Just a quick question: Do your OpenSong songs have chords on them? If you're not using chords, then you can have it immediately, because that part is already done.

connan · Post by **connan** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 9:18 am

A lot of the songs do have chords on them, although we don't use the chords and I usually remove them from a song if it is the first time we sing it.

Post by **Sebastian** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 9:30 am

connan wrote:A lot of the songs do have chords on them, although we don't use the chords and I usually remove them from a song if it is the first time we sing it.

That makes things easy, because we'll just skip the chords then. Here's the download link for the importer.
http://www.songbeamer.com/bin/SongImporter.exe

connan · Post by **connan** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 9:55 am

Thanks again!

OpenSong has a function whereby you only have to type each verse & chorus etc once and then have an Original Presentation Order or Custom Presentation Order defined.

For example:

Original Presentation Order
v1 c v2 c

Custom Presentation Order
v1 c v2 c c b c c2

The text is then defined as:

Code: Select all

&#91;v1&#93;
 Come Holy Spirit we worship your name
 Our lives they are yours to inspire
 Fountain of light, love and glory remain
 Source of our spiritual fire

&#91;c&#93;
 We long for your touch to brighten our way
 We long for your spirit to guide
 We long to see Christ's love take root in our heart
 We want to be changed, changed from inside

&#91;v2&#93;
 How can we know God without your desire
 Without you love ceases to shine
 I'll sing with the saints of the joy of your touch
 The depths of your love so divine

&#91;b&#93;
 Holy Spirit fall on me
 Holy Spirit we need your peace

&#91;c2&#93;
 We long for your touch to brighten our way
 We long for your spirit to guide
 We long to see Christ's love take root in our heart
 We want to be changed, changed from inside
 We want to be changed, changed from inside

Any chance of extracting the Original Presentation Order or Custom Presentation Order from the song files and importing the versus/choruses etc in the correct order?

Can a similar Presentation Order field/option be implemented into SongBeamer?

Post by **Sebastian** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 10:37 am

Yes, this can be done. I have updated the importer, you can download it again.

The custom verse order will be available in SongBeamer 3.0. You can downloaded Release Candidate 2 here:
SongBeamer V3 Beta

(The update to SongBeamer 3.x will be free if you buy SongBeamer 2.x now).

connan · Post by **connan** » Thu Apr 03, 2008 1:10 am

Some further clarification on how I believe Open Song uses a particular heirarchical order for display:

Assume a song is entered as:

Code: Select all

&#91;v1&#93; 
 Come Holy Spirit we worship your name 
 Our lives they are yours to inspire 
 Fountain of light, love and glory remain 
 Source of our spiritual fire 

&#91;c&#93; 
 We long for your touch to brighten our way 
 We long for your spirit to guide 
 We long to see Christ's love take root in our heart 
 We want to be changed, changed from inside 

&#91;v2&#93; 
 How can we know God without your desire 
 Without you love ceases to shine 
 I'll sing with the saints of the joy of your touch 
 The depths of your love so divine 

&#91;b&#93; 
 Holy Spirit fall on me 
 Holy Spirit we need your peace 

&#91;c2&#93; 
 We long for your touch to brighten our way 
 We long for your spirit to guide 
 We long to see Christ's love take root in our heart 
 We want to be changed, changed from inside 
 We want to be changed, changed from inside

Normally it would be displayed as:

v1 c v2 b c2

If an Original Presentation Order was defined/present, it would then be displayed, such as:

v1 c v2 c b c c2

If a Custom Presentation Order was defined/present, it would then be displayed, such as:

v1 c v2 c v1 c v2 c b c c2

So the heirarchy I believe is in OpenSong is:

1. Custom Presentation Order, if not defined then...
2. Original Presentation Order, if not defined then...
3. Order of text/versus etc entered into OpenSong

This may required a revisit of the coding and rules in the importer to ensure that the heirarchy is taken into consideration when importing.

The Original Presentation Order is the order defined when the song is first entered into the software and is the verse/chorus etc structure/format that is usually sung. The Custom Presentation Order can be redefined for each presentation depending on the music team/worship leaders preferences for that service, but can be saved as part of the song for future use/reference.

Thanks.

Nicholas

grodysk · Post by **grodysk** » Tue Jul 08, 2008 1:26 am

I also have been using OpenSong for several years, have HUNDREDS of organized songs in folders with chords, am interested in switching over to SongBeamer for 1 or more clients, but need the songs to import the chords and organizational folder structure before i would make the switch.

Is there a mass import tool yet that can handle chords and folder system?

I like your product, and the guitar chords inclusion a main selling point. In fact, in the future, we would like a 3rd monitor for a musicians lead sheets that would show chords when the main projector doesn't show them.

Post by **Sebastian** » Tue Jul 08, 2008 11:04 am

grodysk wrote:Is there a mass import tool yet that can handle chords and folder system?

We don't have that yet, but I think we'll be able to do that.

Post by **Sebastian** » Thu Jul 10, 2008 3:34 pm

We've added a new button "Import OpenSong Folder Structure" to the importer. This will convert a whole OpenSong folder structure and write the songs to the output folder including all subfolders.

We've added support for chords as well. The chord import function is not perfect yet, because it doesn't handle the _ correctly. We also need to add support for songs with "numbered verses". That is lines that start with a number instead of a space.

http://www.songbeamer.com/bin/SongImporter.exe