In the Dutch traditional church setting there are nowadays different roles that define a church service:
the pastor/preacher: configures the service from a standard liturgy order (picks the songs / picks bible verses and preaches)
the organplayer musician (who needs sheet music to play)
and/or the music team musicians (they need sheet music/ accord schemes (of some) of the songs)
the music team singers (they need music lyrics)
the "beamist" that sets up the service in a beamer program (OpenSong, EasyWorship, etc). He needs to have a song database and input from pastor/preacher / music team of witch verses to sing/ and sing order.
He completes the setfile with (transparent) background images, (extern) media files (pptx, mpeg, ...)
the web-site manager of the church: puts services/liturgy on site and needs input
the congregants/church attendants (online): can serviced by displaying song texts, bible verses, (ppt)media, etc. to follow the service.
My idea is to create a new facility in Open Song
1. for a pastor/preacher to simply click a service together from a standard liturgy order. And has freedom to add/remove/shuffle.
2. then musicians can feedback / complete the liturgy by replacing proposed songs or filling in the blank songitems from the standard liturgy.
3. so that the other roles can take over to export to site/process to make the set service-ready.
4.
From the songs in Open Song you have (already) possibility to add chords,
but (request) also a link to a sheet musicfile can be placed (A new field in open Song file structure?)
and (request) a link to the song on YouTube (for learning/or to display when there is no accompainment from musicians.
Then exports can be easily made -> liturgy order (with or without song texts) Songs (with chords) links to sheet-music etc..
For this you should have a shared file database (dropbox or so) so that every role can access/enrich the songdatabase and a (digital) sheetmusic library.
Please let me know what you think of this.
God Bless!
Allian Mulder
NB: I now use Open song only for my music database. And am a "beamist" with Easy worship in my church
and next year hoping to start in a new music group in my church as a guitarist.
I have (little) programming experience in Python and I am already trying to program some things around Open Song.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
For the link, it is already possible to to use one of the 3 User defined
attributes to save those. Unfortunately attaching arbitrary files isn't
currently supported.
I believe there's currently some efforts to move everything to a database
though rather than the current file structure. This may help and/or hurt.
In the Dutch traditional church setting there are nowadays different roles
that define a church service:
the pastor/preacher: configures the service from a standard liturgy
order (picks the songs / picks bible verses and preaches)
the organplayer musician (who needs sheet music to play)
and/or the music team musicians (they need sheet music/ accord
schemes (of some) of the songs)
the music team singers (they need music lyrics)
the "beamist" that sets up the service in a beamer program
(OpenSong, EasyWorship, etc). He needs to have a song database and input
from pastor/preacher / music team of witch verses to sing/ and sing order.
He completes the setfile with (transparent) background images,
(extern) media files (pptx, mpeg, ...)
the web-site manager of the church: puts services/liturgy on site
and needs input
the congregants/church attendants (online): can serviced by
displaying song texts, bible verses, (ppt)media, etc. to follow the service.
My idea is to create a new facility in Open Song
1. for a pastor/preacher to simply click a service together from a
standard liturgy order. And has freedom to add/remove/shuffle.
2. then musicians can feedback / complete the liturgy by replacing
proposed songs or filling in the blank songitems from the standard liturgy.
3. so that the other roles can take over to export to site/process to make
the set service-ready.
4.
From the songs in Open Song you have (already) possibility to add chords,
but (request) also a link to a sheet musicfile can be placed (A new field
in open Song file structure?)
and (request) a link to the song on YouTube (for learning/or to display
when there is no accompainment from musicians.
Then exports can be easily made ->
liturgy order (with or without song texts) * Songs (with chords)
links to sheet-music * etc..
For this you should have a shared file database (dropbox or so) so that
every role can access/enrich the songdatabase and a (digital) sheetmusic
library.
Please let me know what you think of this.
God Bless!
Allian Mulder
NB: I now use Open song only for my music database. And am a "beamist"
with Easy worship in my church
and next year hoping to start in a new music group in my church as a
guitarist.
I have (little) programming experience in Python and I am already trying
to program some things around Open Song.
Allian, thank you for your thoughts and your suggestions for a role-based user system for OpenSong. It is an interesting concept. I am part of a church with a similar liturgical tradition (Presbyterian Church-USA), so I am familiar with your system for developing the worship service.
I can see the value in this, but I am not sure how it would be best implemented in OpenSong. Since our Song and Set formats are XML-based and use simple files, it would be easy to write "helper" programs that are streamlined for a specific user such as a pastor without making OpenSong more complex or requiring a pastor to navigate a user interface that is really more focused on the user who creates lead sheets or sets for presentation (or beaming). This concept is not unique: Unix was originally designed with the philosophy that each command or utility should perform a single function.
Although I am only one of the developers on OpenSong, I do not have any plans to work on moving OpenSong's storage system to a database as suggested by Oon-Ee Ng in his comment above. I believe that OpenSong needs to address changes in Windows and macOS file storage since OpenSong was initially developed, in particular, better separation of read-only and read-write data. For example, full customization of some aspects of OpenSong require editing files that should be read-only and are now part of the signing and notarization process. Also, I think it is time to add extensions to the filenames. These would be incompatible, one-way changes. Of course, using a database — as EasyWorship and others do — would make full-text search and some other functions easier to accomplish, but require more work to support multiple users or multiple programs accessing the database.
I do not want to stop the conversation here by what I have written. Rather, I want to interject some thoughts about possible ways to move forward in the fastest way possible.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
That's interesting Ed, I thought you were the one who mentioned some years
back of a database backend. I'm relieved this isn't currently planned,
since my church relies on dropbox file-based syncing.
Regarding helper programs, we use some ourselves for our different
ministries. One for auto-generating our preferred format of chords for a
set, and another for automatically inserting line breaks for certain
screens where we only want a maximum of two lines for lyric projection.
Allian, thank you for your thoughts and your suggestions for a role-based
user system for OpenSong. It is an interesting concept. I am part of a
church with a similar liturgical tradition (Presbyterian Church-USA), so I
am familiar with your system for developing the worship service.
I can see the value in this, but I am not sure how it would be best
implemented in OpenSong. Since our Song and Set formats are XML-based and
use simple files, it would be easy to write "helper" programs that are
streamlined for a specific user such as a pastor without making OpenSong
more complex or requiring a pastor to navigate a user interface that is
really more focused on the user who creates lead sheets or sets for
presentation (or beaming). This concept is not unique: Unix was originally
designed with the philosophy that each command or utility should perform a
single function.
Although I am only one of the developers on OpenSong, I do not have any
plans to work on moving OpenSong's storage system to a database as
suggested by Oon-Ee Ng in his comment above. I believe that OpenSong needs
to address changes in Windows and macOS file storage since OpenSong was
initially developed, in particular, better separation of read-only and
read-write data. For example, full customization of some aspects of
OpenSong require editing files that should be read-only and are now part of
the signing and notarization process. Also, I think it is time to add
extensions to the filenames. These would be incompatible, one-way changes.
Of course, using a database — as EasyWorship and others do — would make
full-text search and some other functions easier to accomplish, but require
more work to support multiple users or multiple programs accessing the
database.
I do not want to stop the conversation here by what I have written.
Rather, I want to interject some thoughts about possible ways to move
forward in the fastest way possible.
I may have mentioned something about using a database before. I know I have considered it multiple times. There are some advantages. If we were doing a completely new OpenSong I would look at it more closely. Too many things would need to change both in OpenSong and in many churches' workflows (yours and mine are both examples).
My last church used a file sharing ("dropbox"-type service) to synchronize between my home computer, the laptop in the sanctuary, and the church administrative assistant's computer. I also used a shared drive at church to store PNG files that were the backgrounds for our songs and I had a complete separate copy at home. We would have been paying for that space in a cloud storage system if it was in a database and we had to have a single copy.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
In the Dutch traditional church setting there are nowadays different roles that define a church service:
He completes the setfile with (transparent) background images, (extern) media files (pptx, mpeg, ...)
My idea is to create a new facility in Open Song
1. for a pastor/preacher to simply click a service together from a standard liturgy order. And has freedom to add/remove/shuffle.
2. then musicians can feedback / complete the liturgy by replacing proposed songs or filling in the blank songitems from the standard liturgy.
3. so that the other roles can take over to export to site/process to make the set service-ready.
4.
From the songs in Open Song you have (already) possibility to add chords,
but (request) also a link to a sheet musicfile can be placed (A new field in open Song file structure?)
and (request) a link to the song on YouTube (for learning/or to display when there is no accompainment from musicians.
Then exports can be easily made ->
liturgy order (with or without song texts)
Songs (with chords)
links to sheet-music
etc..
For this you should have a shared file database (dropbox or so) so that every role can access/enrich the songdatabase and a (digital) sheetmusic library.
Please let me know what you think of this.
God Bless!
Allian Mulder
NB: I now use Open song only for my music database. And am a "beamist" with Easy worship in my church
and next year hoping to start in a new music group in my church as a guitarist.
I have (little) programming experience in Python and I am already trying to program some things around Open Song.
For the link, it is already possible to to use one of the 3 User defined
attributes to save those. Unfortunately attaching arbitrary files isn't
currently supported.
I believe there's currently some efforts to move everything to a database
though rather than the current file structure. This may help and/or hurt.
On Mon, Dec 27, 2021 at 6:54 PM Allian Mulder allianm@users.sourceforge.net
wrote:
We have a dropbox for text and chords maybe add youtub link to?
Allian, thank you for your thoughts and your suggestions for a role-based user system for OpenSong. It is an interesting concept. I am part of a church with a similar liturgical tradition (Presbyterian Church-USA), so I am familiar with your system for developing the worship service.
I can see the value in this, but I am not sure how it would be best implemented in OpenSong. Since our Song and Set formats are XML-based and use simple files, it would be easy to write "helper" programs that are streamlined for a specific user such as a pastor without making OpenSong more complex or requiring a pastor to navigate a user interface that is really more focused on the user who creates lead sheets or sets for presentation (or beaming). This concept is not unique: Unix was originally designed with the philosophy that each command or utility should perform a single function.
Although I am only one of the developers on OpenSong, I do not have any plans to work on moving OpenSong's storage system to a database as suggested by Oon-Ee Ng in his comment above. I believe that OpenSong needs to address changes in Windows and macOS file storage since OpenSong was initially developed, in particular, better separation of read-only and read-write data. For example, full customization of some aspects of OpenSong require editing files that should be read-only and are now part of the signing and notarization process. Also, I think it is time to add extensions to the filenames. These would be incompatible, one-way changes. Of course, using a database — as EasyWorship and others do — would make full-text search and some other functions easier to accomplish, but require more work to support multiple users or multiple programs accessing the database.
I do not want to stop the conversation here by what I have written. Rather, I want to interject some thoughts about possible ways to move forward in the fastest way possible.
That's interesting Ed, I thought you were the one who mentioned some years
back of a database backend. I'm relieved this isn't currently planned,
since my church relies on dropbox file-based syncing.
Regarding helper programs, we use some ourselves for our different
ministries. One for auto-generating our preferred format of chords for a
set, and another for automatically inserting line breaks for certain
screens where we only want a maximum of two lines for lyric projection.
On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 10:36 PM Ed Palmer swampcat@users.sourceforge.net
wrote:
I may have mentioned something about using a database before. I know I have considered it multiple times. There are some advantages. If we were doing a completely new OpenSong I would look at it more closely. Too many things would need to change both in OpenSong and in many churches' workflows (yours and mine are both examples).
My last church used a file sharing ("dropbox"-type service) to synchronize between my home computer, the laptop in the sanctuary, and the church administrative assistant's computer. I also used a shared drive at church to store PNG files that were the backgrounds for our songs and I had a complete separate copy at home. We would have been paying for that space in a cloud storage system if it was in a database and we had to have a single copy.