Keeping track of songs used

[Pastor Tim]

Every year I try to do some analysis of the songs we use in worship. In part, it is to see if we are over-using certain songs, but mainly I see it as a way to keep the "hot list" for the worship team up to date.

In years past I have just made out my lists from the bulletin or worship leader notes (which I save each week). Now that we have been using MS 3.5 for almost a year I'm hoping that I can streamline the process.

I have saved each weeks cue list as a separate file, so I can easily go back and look at all of them. I started going in and printing them out, but realized that I wasn't gaining anything over using the hand-written notes.

Is there any way in MS or with an external utility to take a directory full of scripts and get a list of all the songs used? This seems like a pretty obvious kind of thing, but as far as I can tell there isn't a way to do it in MS.

Pastor Tim

[Gene]

There's not an automated way I know of in MediaShout. It'd be handy not only for analyzing what you play, but for the occasional tracking that's required as part of the CCLI license.

[daver2]

We looked for a similar thing a while ago when we installed our kit (we use Presentation Manager) but we couldn't find anything that met our needs. In the end one of our AV guys wrote his own application script in PERL - it works a dream but that doesn't help you out!

If your script files are plain text - and have some recognisable structure to them - then it should be possible to write a script using using something like GREP or AWK to extract the text strings for the songs.

Our solution is to work 'backwards' and to select the songs from a master list using a small application script. This script then generates the files for Presentation Manger (including the text, font and colour formatting etc.) and also logs the song usage in a database for use with the CCLI license.

[Pastor Tim]

Well, right now I have my son tabulating the information from the last year's worth of worship planning sheets. Not efficient, but it will have to do, I guess.

It just seems like an obvious feature, you know?

Pastor Tim

[tlofft]

It looks like this is quite possible, as the SSC files are actually XML under the covers.

Are you looking to get a list of songs for an individual script, or a combined list from all the scripts?

I was able to put together a quick script (actually an XSL transform) which came up with the following output. Is this the type of thing your looking for?

This was based on one of our recent services.

-- Tim

Media Shout - Songs in Script

SongTitle	Author
Hallelujah What a Savior	Phillip P. Bliss
All The Earth Will Sing Your Praises	Paul Baloche
Every Move I Make	David Ruis
Shout To The Lord	Darlene Zschech
You Are My All In All	Dennis Jernigan
Yours	Laura Woodley-Osman

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[jonathan.smith5]

One of the things we started doing during our worship planning sessions to keep up with what songs we've used is to have somebody (or several sombodies) create an ongoing memo with the date and songs on their cell phone. Our guitarist has an iphone and has all of our songs for the past year and a half on it!! It's really come in handy as we try to expand the number of songs we sing!!

I know it doesn't help now, but might be useful into the future!!

Pax,

Jonathan

[Pastor Tim]

Tim, I may have to dive under the hood a bit and see what is there. What you got is pretty much what I'm looking for. It would then feed into a database (ideally) or list (probably) so that we could have some idea of what songs we have used most recently and how frequently we use certain songs. I've been insanely busy the last month, but will try to follow up on this project in the near future.

Pastor Tim

[sieve]

Hey guys,

I know this is an old thread, but our church is up in the reporting rotation, so I threw together a quick web app that would parse out the song info/counts from a ZIP of the ssc scripts we're using.

I can't post URLs yet (need 15 posts), so you'll have to google 'techpartner', then click on the Toolbox link in the menu, then Mediashout CCLI Reporting tool.

Dave