[LAU] using linux to manage your gigs?

david gnome at hawaii.rr.com
Sat May 12 20:58:09 UTC 2012


On 05/12/2012 10:16 AM, Josh Lawrence wrote:
> hi list,
>
> this is one of my busiest times of the year for gigging; I'm usually
> playing at least once a week, and sometimes multiple times a week.
> there are a couple of things I'm frustrated about:
>
> * my song lists are all on paper.  they have no information about the
> song at all.  it would be nice to be able to sort by key, genre
> (rock, pop, r&b, motown, etc.).  it would be nice if calling up the
> song called up the chord chart, which brings me to my next point…
>
> * I looked through many presentation softwares, chord chart
> management, etc.  they all seem focused on the church crowd.  I need
> something *simple*.  I choose a song, and the chart that I have
> available for it (either text or pdf or whatever) is displayed in a
> split window.
>
> ok, that's what I want, and no one gets what they want.  :)  so, I'm
> open to any and all ideas.  what do you use?  do you manage your set
> lists with linux?  chord charts?  I tried the whole "thinking outside
> the box" and looked for maybe some file management software, but I
> got overwhelmed quickly.  any and all ideas are welcome.

Hmmm, as a member of the "church crowd", I'd say the general church
person is just like you - wanting things SIMPLE! But the church band I'm 
in manages things on paper, too, since we have our service music planned 
in advance. (And I'm the only Linux user in the bunch.)

Maybe Recoll would be usable for you? It's powerful file indexing
software, so no problems finding files. Once a file is found, it 
provides links to Preview or Open the file. I don't know how it would 
support searching for things like key, genre, etc. It can read and index 
a whole pile of formats, so I'm guessing that if your chart has the 
key/genre information in it, you can search that way. Doesn't give you 
anyway to sort results, though, so you'd have to change your search and 
run it again. (Not an issue to me, recoll is very very fast at 
retrieving from its indexes!) I just previewed an MP3 file from Recoll 
and it showed me the Artist, Date, Genre and Title fields from the mp3. 
And Recoll indexes those fields, so when I searched for "*.mp3 David" it 
found MP3s where I'm listed as artist.

Another possibility would be Tellico. You could create a "collection" of 
your charts, and add fields for key, genre, etc, Tellico has a URL field 
type that you could use to create a link to the chart itself. I haven't 
done that myself, so I'm just guessing that if you click the URL field 
while viewing a record, it would open the file.

Unlike Recoll, you'd have to manually create Tellico entries, but 
Tellico would give you the flexibility of creating fields for whatever 
metadata you wanted to use for searching ...

Anyway, some thoughts!

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://clanjones.org/david/
http://dancing-treefrog.deviantart.com/


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