[crashkahuna]

Now that I've been using the program a while I have several hundred songs. I should organize them (by style, genre etc?). How could I do it quickly?. Somehow put all songs at once into the 'jazz' collection and then move the non jazz stuff to other collections?. It would be nice if there was a setting that said 'collection required' that made me put all new songs into a collection when I add it. I could use collection, style, genre - doesn't matter - whatever quickest.

Thanks!

[tjrob]

I have >1,300 songs on my tablets, some of which are vocal scores > 200 pages (I am a pianist and also play chamber music and accompany choruses). I organize using genre and title. I currently have 10 genres: ChamberMusic, Christmas, Classical, Gilbert&Sullivan, SATB, Showtunes&Pop, Working, and three more, one for each organization I play with. As I have 2 tablets (for backup), I do all organization and annotations on my PC, with a folder for each genre. A song can be in multiple genres, and some songs in SATB and Classical are also in one of the organization genres. I keep each organization's genre pared down to the concert we are preparing, so for rehearsals I just select the genre and can easily bring up the piece as the conductor chooses them. I arrange for the genre to have songs in concert order, often by putting the numerical order at the front of each title; for orchestra concerts, if I'm tacet I create a 1-page PDF saying so, and put it into the genre, in concert order.

One group is preparing the Brahms "Ein deutsches Requiem". I gave each movement that title followed by its Roman numeral, so there are currently 7 songs in that organization's genre. For rehearsals I can jump around easily as the conductor chooses what to work on. I won't accompany the concert (I'll sing from a paper score), but I could just "Load All" if I did (and will do so when we are ready to run the entire concert).

Practicing on my own, I have three modes: a) select an organization's genre and practice its current pieces; b) select Working and practice my solo repertoire; c) select Songs and work on sight reading.

This has worked very well for me. YMMV.

[Geoff Bacon]

@crashkahuna

A song can be in multiple collections.
It can also be in one or more setlists.

Suggest you use collections for segregating the songs into genres (or whatever) and use Setlists when you want to have them in a predefined order (for a gig say).


While it is quite easy to put the songs into new collections, it does require you going through the list, possibly multiple times, deciding what they should be in.

Suggest you decide your criteria for a collection name e.g. Jazz
On the songs tab, long press one of the song titles you want until it has a tick mark. Then scroll through the list selecting any other songs you want in the collection. When several (all?) selected, press the 3 dots at right hand top of menu bar and select "Create Collection from Songs" (or "Add to Collection" if the collection already exists).
Repeat for other genres (it doesn't matter if you miss some as you can add them in later).

You might be able to use the filters to minimize what you are looking at.
When you have most songs in collections, you can see which ones you missed by using the collection filter (3rd line down when a song is selected) and setting it to "exclude" and "select all"

You can also use the companion to move things in/out of collections (and click on the collection column header to sort the display - those not in a collection will appear together at one end of the list)

You could just move them into collections as you want to use them.

Remember with set lists that you need to replace songs (rather than delete from the "Songs" tab). This means that old setlists will still have a reference to the new version of the song
If you delete the songs (instead of replacing), the old setlists will no longer have a reference to the new song when it is added to the database.

I am in 3 organization groups which often have the same version of a song. While a single song can be mentioned in multiple collections, I typically load the song multiple times (with 3 letter acronym  appended to the song name to indicate the group). This means that changes by one of the organizations don't affect the others. The downside is that it increases storage space (but the files are sing sheet pdfs anyway).

I guess you just have to find what works best for you!

Geoff

[crashkahuna]

Thanks for the suggestions. Good to see how others are doing it. I have setlists for the gigs and that is working well. But for practicing I would like to be able to just see songs that fit my mood such as jazz or jazz-latin or jazz-modal or based on the instrument I am practicing etc. and not see the other stuff like folk and country. So I will try some of your suggestions. I would like to get it done before I have 1000 songs .