[samibe]

I'm an organist as well. I have several hymn and songbooks in my library. The books I use most I've used csv import to pull in all of the songs and their metadata. This makes it so that if I look at the book in the albums tab, I'm looking at a sortable and searchable table of contents. No links required. I also included as much metadata as possible (meters, tune names, composer, lyricist, key, time signature, tempo, duration, topic, holiday (if applicable), etc.) This makes it a lot easier to search for a specific holiday (for example) and get a group of songs (in book or alphabetical order) that are relevant to the same holiday.

Importing multiple hymnals does mean that I have duplicates of several hymns. I find this somewhat helpful because often the duplicates aren't identical. They might be in different keys or one might have the harmony filled out more, or be a better scan, etc. I now have the option to use the version I like best.

On the other hand, I also have several anthology type books that I don't have split into individual songs (mainly because I'm not sure I want that many songs cluttering up my library that I probably won't play or use). In this case, csv import is also nice because I can select the handful of songs I want, and import only those. I'll usually include the whole book as one of the songs so that I can access other (un-imported) songs in the book in the remote chance I need to.