This happens once in a while, just a bit too often to ignore...
I'm at a gig, session, whatever. Shall we play Song X? Okay, I have Song X in my song collection. Play in the key of A? Great, a ChordPro song is quickly transposed. Happy playing. Next song...
But Song X is also part of a setlist that I have prepared for a gig I have the next week. And next week, when on stage, when Song X turns up, I start playing the wrong chords since the song was transposed to the key of A.
Sounds familiar? Or am I the only one that gets bitten by this?
Worse, I can't even find a fail-safe way to prevent this from happening. Can you?
Other than having separate files in each of the required keys - which rather defeats the object of a chordpro file - I think the only solution would be to add a note that tells you which key is used in a specific circumstance, e.g. "Band A requires Bb" "Band B requires G" and so on. Then you can do a quick transpose before you start laying.
Usually I'm glad if I have enough time to locate the song and transpose it... Adding notes is not really feasible.
What came up when thinking about this, is the ability to 'fork' a song when (or after) selecting it. It will then become a new, independent song with its own settings, transpositions, notes and so on.
Well, you can do this forking more or less with the snippet function as you surely know, or doesn't that work with pro files?
Also maybe Mike's versioning plans might help.
Another way could be a feature “reset all songs to original key with next restart (of MSP)“ but I don't know if that's worth it to code.
Have you tried using 'reset' in the 'transpose popup? I suppose remembering,or time, to do that at the end may be a problem, but....
That relies on the song not already being transposed...
For example, the song .cho file is in C, it is transposed to E for normal use. When I load it for this gig and transpose it to A, a future reset will go back to C, not E.
Ok, I didn't consider more than one transpose action. I tried a 2 step transposition, creating a snippet and making a copy in the songs tab, both reset back to the original also.
(08-12-2017, 11:03 PM)sciurius Wrote: [ -> ]Usually I'm glad if I have enough time to locate the song and transpose it... Adding notes is not really feasible.
I wasn't thinking of adding a note whilst gigging - that's something to do at home.
If I could remember at home which songs I changed, the problem would not exist...
The versioning feature might be helpful with this, and it also sounds like what you described is similar to the current snippet feature. Are you wanting to create a temporary song that is deleted right after you are done viewing it? If not, I would think the snippet feature would work well for this.
I suppose there would also be no time to add the song(s) to a special setlist? (for later review)
Also, isn't there a 'song history' feature somewhere in the app? I seem to recall a previous discussion about it, but maybe it was a feature request.
Yes! The 'Recent' tab.
You could clear it before every session, then you would at least have a short(er) list to review for changes 'the morning after'.
It seems to me that would be quicker (since it's automatic) than making a special temporary copy.
At least it could be a workaround for the time being...
Yes, the snippet feature comes close the what I had in mind with 'forking'.
Would it be possible, when creating a snippet, to pre-fill the current name in the 'Name' field? This makes it easy to edit the current name into a new name (e.g., Fancy Song becomes Fancy Song 2).
Or append " (Snippet)" to the title or something similar?
Sure, I can look into changing that.
I know that situation well. It's a session workflow. Preparing a song in different keys at home (having enough time) is easy
What I do is:
- I note the frequently used keys within the ChordPro file, usually in another subtitle
- I take care that the ChordPro file is in the most important key so that "Reset" helps in many cases
That does not solve the problem when a song is regularly used in more than one key.
The snippet tool looks like a good idea.
I can imagine a number of improvements:
- prefill "Name:" with the current song title as proposed would be great
That would need an "X" button to delete that default name for the existing workflow of splitting a PDF into several songs
- access to the snippet tool could be faster, currently it needs many actions to get there, the "Quick Action Box" would be a perfect place.
Merging the "Quick Action Box" and the "Floating Toolbar" into one, freely configurable UI element would be great. That would be worth another feature request.
- adding the new snippet to a specific group e.g. a collection "new snippets" or even configurable "jam session 2017-08-13" would help sorting out the next day which ones to keep and which ones to be discarded