Home » Developer Blogs » raoul's blog

Is there hope for CCLI SongSelect integration?

By raoul on 31 August 2008

As many folks know, the CCLI SongSelect importer in openlp.org has been disabled due to problems with the service. What many people don't know is that all the applications out there that interface with SongSelect are actually pretending to be web browsers, and are painstakingly pulling the information out of the SongSelect web pages.

The reason openlp.org (and many other presentation applications) stopped working with SongSelect was because CCLI was busy moving their systems from a ColdFusion-based setup to an ASP.NET-based setup (to be honest, I'm not sure if that's an improvement). I took a look at SongSelect again today, and it seems like they have finished the conversion and are now in full swing with the ASP.NET system.

This is both good news and bad news for us. The good news is that it means that we can integrate with SongSelect again. The bad news is that ASP.NET is a terrible system (for reasons I won't go into right now) and it's gonna take a very long time to get the SongSelect integration working again.

We're going to look into getting it going for release with openlp.org 1.2, but unfortunately we can't make any promises.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Re: Is there hope for CCLI SongSelect integration?

By ginsumaster on 24 September 2008

CCLI SongSelect integration is highly highly over-rated.

Why?  CCLI SongSelect lyrics are chaotic, inconsistent and require manual editing ANYWAY.

 

1. Each CCLI song starts with chorus -- whether or not you (or the artist) sings it that way.

2. Bridge is marked as "other".

3. Pre-chorus is sometimes mislabeled or not labeled at all.

4. Line breaks are done at every vocal phrase (when you take a breath).  In my experience, most songbooks I've done required 2-3 phrases to be combined into one line.

 

In short, my 800 page worship team songbook required EACH AND EVERY CCLI SONG lyric to be manually edited. I've used CCLI SongSelect for 5 years and know it in and out.  I even found about 6 lyric/typo errors which I reported to CCLI.

 

In summary, let's compare:

NEW SOLUTION w/ CCLI SongSelect Integration: copy, paste, edit.

CURRENT SOLUTION: copy paste and edit.

 

Can someone tell me the difference?  I see none.