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Ask HN: Does this software exist?

As a musician on the side, I've come across a "problem" that I'm hoping someone can help me solve. Here's the "problem":

* I have a group of songs that I play (let's say 50) that is a fairly static list

* I want to be able to plan out set lists based on those songs for various gigs and then print out the set lists in advance

Right now, I'm using a kludgey combination of Excel and Word (Windows guy, but I do have a MBP). It sucks - I make the list of songs in Excel, then I create a separate document for each night (and copy/paste the songs in).

Ideally there's a piece of software that lets me drag and drop the song onto a "view" (or whatever) that I can save/retrieve/print. I'm just trying to simplify the process of creating a set list. Sure, I could create it but it seems like this should exist already (but I can't find it).

Any ideas?

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Maybe some of the software used for "setlists" for worship songs in Church services would help? You can do things like print lyrics with chords, "song books" and such; a basic feature is preparing a list of songs for the expected running order.

Only ones I know of (from research a few years ago on FOSS apps for this) http://opensong.org/d/about, http://www.easyslides.com/index.php/features, http://openlp.org/en/features, http://www.lyricue.org/.

There are very mature paid apps for this sort of thing too.

HTH.

You could use TeX or LaTeX. Create an individual file for each song, containing whatever information you want to print for it. Presumably there are music-oriented LaTeX extensions that can pretty-print the lines and clefs or whatever (not a musician, so I don't know what, exactly, a set list should look like).

Then your play list for each night consists of a sequence of songs you want to play:

  \input songs/stairway-to-heaven.tex
  \input songs/take-me-out-to-the-ballgame.tex
  \input songs/venus-in-furs.tex

As you get more sophisticated, or as your needs grow, you can define macros that control what gets printed, or how.

How is this better than doing it in Excel with copy/paste as he does now?

What benefit does LaTeX bring, so that he has to install some hundreds of mbs of a TeX distro and learn the basics to work in it? Does he need elaborate math symbols or fine grained typography for a set list?

I just found an iOS app called "Set List Keeper" that works 100% and is free.

http://itunes.apple.com/mo/app/set-list-keeper/id514144626?m...

There are things I wish it had but they are minor things.

Thanks everyone for the help!

The iTunes playlist thing makes me think of another option: creating a "Contact" for each song title in a contact mgmt app, and then creating a "Group"/"Category" for each set and adding that contact to that group. It's the same thing - just a different twist on how to think about it.

Lets say you have all of these songs on your iPod, you can create a 'playlist' and then print that out in iTunes. I used to do that with MusicMatch when I made a CD for the road, burn the playlist to the CD and print the playlist for the label.

Yeah, Playlist is exactly what I'm talking about. I didn't know you could print a playlist.

You could create an iTunes playlist with your songs.

1) Create a playlist with all the songs.

2) Right click on it, and click "duplicate".

3) Drag the songs to the order you want. Remove any songs you don't want in this set.

4) From the menu, go "File -> Print" and select song list.

Repeat steps 2 to 3 as many times you want. You can also rename the set playlist, to reflect the set name (e.g "2012-22-09").

Alternatively: you could also use some "todo management" style software to print lists of things (in your case, song names) that you can re-arrange.

Bento might also be an option.

That's great - thank you. The iTunes playlist option will be "good enough" for my purposes. It's a hacky way to do it but at least I'll have a reason to use iTunes for something other than backing up/configuring my phone haha.

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