SongEditor

The SongEditor is used to prepare songs for display, print and projection in the various modules that make up the SongManager suite. The SongEditor can read and write files in the following formats:

• Song files (.song) - Native to the SwiftTec Song Management System
• Text files (.txt) - As created by notepad, and other plain text editors
• Creative Lifestyle song files (.sng)
• XML Song Files

Song Structure

Songs have an extendable structure which looks like this:

• General Song Information such as
  • Title
  • Author
  • Copyright
  • Tempo
  • Primary Key
  • Unique identifier
  • Indexing entries
  • References to where the song can be listened to, downloaded, played, bought, etc
    • CD recordings
    • Songbooks
    • Website links
• A number of song sections which has a number of attributes
  • The section type
    • Intro
    • Verse
    • Pre-Chorus
    • Chorus
    • Bridge
    • Ending
    • Tag
    • Miscellaneous
  • The singer type
    • Default
    • All
    • Women
    • Men
    • etc
  • The target audience
    • Leader
    • Band
    • Audience
  • Indentation level
  • Sequence Identifier
  • Repeats
  • Links to other blocks
• Each section has a number of lines, each of which has attributes
  • Singer type
  • Indentation level
  • Repeats

The song format allows for contain chords, annotations, translations and much more, though at the point of writing some of these have still to be implemented. The song format will be extended to include further information as the software is extended.

Using the Song Editor

The basic song editor has been completely re-designed from it's original version and now appears as shown below.

 

The editor consists of several sections

• The main menu
• The toolbars
• The main editing window

The main menu and tools bars have the same functionality, the toolbars are intended to make the most common functions easily available.

• - File/New - create a new song file
• - File/Open - open an existing song file for editing
• - File/Save - save the current file
• - Key/Transpose Down
• - Key/Transpose Up
• - View/Guitar Chords - view with guitar chords
• - View/Bass Notes - view with bass notes
• - Song Info - show/edit the song info.

Editing the Song Info

Clicking the Song Info button displays the song info page:

Here you can enter the primary song information such as the song title, author, copyright and key. The index entries tab allows you to add entries that might be commonly used to find the song. The references tab allows links to song resources to be added.

Editing the Song

Each section consists of an information section on the left hand side with the lyrics and chords on the right hand side. The editor functions much like any basic text editor, so text can be added by simply typing and the characters are are inserted in the song at the current cursor position.

Note: at the time of writing it is not possible to highlight sections of text for replacement, deletion or copying. This functionality will be added in due course.

Chords can be added/edited at the current cursor position by pressing the F9 key which will display a popup box in which you can edit the chord:

Chords are entered in a standard format:

• Chord
  or
• Chord / Bass

Where a chord takes the form of note and optional suffix (e.g. m, maj, sus). The note must be one of A B C D E F G and can include the # or b. The editor converts the note into a common format and may alter the chord to fit the key, e.g Ab may convert to G#

Changing The Section Attributes

The attributes of a section can be changed by settings the cursor into the section of interest and changing the attributes via function key, toolbar or menu.

Starting a New Section

A new section is started automatically each time 2 blank lines are entered.

Editing the Song Sequence

The song sequence is the order in which sections will be sung. By default the song sequence is automatically generated using an algorithm which should generate the sequence correctly most of the time, however to accomodate the cases it cannot calculate automatically you can edit the song sequence manually using the controls in the Default Play Sequence toolbar.

• To start manual editing click on the Edit button
• Click on the section to be sung first
• Click on the next section to be sung
• Repeat until the sequence is correct
• Click on the Edit  button again to save

 

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