My vote: two additional right-click options on the setlist window.
“Move to Top” (in addition to “Move Up”, “Move Down”)
“Alphabetize” (to reset things)
That would save me loads of time!
Background: I work in a band that has about 120 songs in the repertoire. I have them all in one big alphabetized setlist called “main”. Every gig we do has a different setlist planned, but I pull them all from the “main” setlist to the top so that when inevitably we decide to slip something unplanned in, I have all the songs in the current setlist - just have to scroll down below the seperator that marks the bottom of the planned setlist to find the rest of them.
It’s a bit of pain to build them. The .cantabile files themselves I keep in their associated song directories (e.g. “Layla.cantabile” is under c:\band\songs\layla\layla.cantabile) so for a typical gig that’s either visiting 35 different folders, or dragging 35 songs around in a window that only displays 18 at a time, and that doesn’t scroll to keep the currently-selected file in view when using the Ctrl-arrow key shortcut. It’s a long trip for “You Ready Got Me” up to a location 20 from the top; I highlight it, push Ctrl-arrow using autorepeat to get it up to the top, then scroll up until the 20th position is visible, Ctrl-down, realize that somehow when adjusting the scroll bars the song became deselected, scroll up to find it, highlight it, drag it down 18 spaces, scroll up a bit, then drag it into place…and then repeat.
But I prefer this to drag/dropping from Explorer because then the setlist wouldn’t have a complete record of all 120 songs for the oddball callout.
If I could just right click the ones I want to move them to the top, then alphabetize everything when done, it would greatly speed up the process!
I’d REALLY like to be able to drag my songs (and even more than that, racks) up and down. It’s a drag (ha, see what I did there!) when you add something after the fact you want to group near the top and you have to move up… move up… move up… move up… lol Then there would be less of a need for a move to the top function. Just drag things up and down where you want them. This is another thing I’ve become used to in SONAR.
Dragging would be very intuitive for smaller setlists that mostly fit on the screen so you can see the original and destination points.
For ones of 100 or more, it could be difficult though - that’s where being able to type the first few letters of the song to select, and then right-click to move it to the top would be awesome sauce.
Actually sounds like what would be better is “move to section” where it puts it at the end of the selected section. Wouldn’t move to top, result in a set list where the most recently moved to top would be first in the list and therefore probably in reverse order to what you want. Imagine instead you had two breaks in your list “Active” and “All Songs” and right click on any song had a “Move to Active” and “Move to All Songs” commands which moved it to the bottom of that section.
Do you mean this:
Re: dragging to re-order. I will be adding this, but because of some issues with the current UI library it’s something I’d prefer address with the revamped UI library that I’m building as part of the OS X port. It will be done eventually, in the meantime Ctrl+Up/Down can reorder things pretty quickly.
Move to section: This is EXACTLY what I want! I bet this would also satisfy the needs of most of the folks who were voting for the Setlist Builder card.
Sort by name: The only thing better than implementing Move to Section is that you’ve ALREADY implemented Sort by Name.
One thing I forgot to mention… are you familiar with the commands:
File -> Add -> Songs to Set List
File -> Add -> Import Song from Another Set List
Both of these are designed for quickly putting together as set list based on existing set lists or by using songs from a directory and are probably quicker than re-arranging an existing set list. Certainly they’ll be quicker than lots of “Move to Active Section” commands.
Those are great ideas if I adopt the idea of moving my .cantabilesong files into their own special directory.
My current practice is a song directory, filled with folders for each song. Each song folder has the .mp3 version for rehearsal practice, my performance notes, usually a Sibelius file and associated .pdf, a Transcribe! file, any special patches (e.g. monolithic .nki for Kontakt), and .CantabileSong file.
I’ve been reluctant to separate the .cantablesong files out into their own directory (e.g. as we permanently jettison songs from our available master setlist it makes things more difficult to track if separated over multiple folders), but given the time it would save building setlists, it’s probably the best practice.
If you’re maintaining an “example getting started” document, it might be a good idea to include in it the idea of keeping a separate folder for Cantabile songs to make setlist management easier.
Hi there,
Have have you considered using shortcuts (aliases)?
Not every program likes loading aliases but Cantabile is happy to reference aliases, whether they be song files or .wav files etc.
You could maintain your existing ‘compartments’ for song organisation but unify any components you like into master directories.
It would take a little more maintenance but it would be one helluva timesaver when it came to grabbing fistfuls of songs.
I’ve tested and it works well.
