Song imports

Well 2.0alpha1 has been out in the wild for just over a week now, and we're both relieved and delighted that the response has been positive! According to the stats, just over 400 of you have been brave enough to download it and give it a try, and we've been been bumped up to 246 in the SourceForge rankings which I think is pretty good for a niche application, out of 266090 registered projects.

If you haven't tried the alpha yet, I'd urge you to please take a look. We'll be interested in your comments, both good and bad as to the progress we've made so far.

You'll be pleased to know that the developers have decided not to take a post-alpha nap, but are instead working as hard as ever towards the alpha-2 release. One of the things we're going to be focusing on is song imports. We all know how tiresome it is to type in the lyrics to the songs, and so we're trying to make your lives easier in this respect.

Raoul is working hard making the existing Song Import menu options functional and pretty, Tim continues to work hard to support the underlying infrastructure, whilst I've been looking at incorporating some of my external v1 utilities into v2. I've already managed to complete the Songs of Fellowship import, and some will be pleased to know that this now uses OpenOffice.org Writer, rather than Microsoft Word. Next I'm going to be looking at a few online options, to get the lyrics from sites such as nethymnal.org, kingswaysongs.co.uk and pwarchive.org. If you're aware of any other sites which offer Christian lyric downloads without requiring registration, then please let me know. On the horizon is a general purpose PowerPoint/Impress/Word/Writer text import.

We've also got newer members of the team working hard to document the database formats used by other worship presentation software in the hope we can also support imports from these. We've even got a couple of guys taking the time to learn to program in Python, so they can contribute import code to the project, which is great!

CCLI import is a bit lower down the priority list, since our CCLI guru (Derek) is still working hard fixing a few things in v1.2.4. However we're hoping that you'll soon stop reporting bugs in that version, so Derek can join in the 2.0 fun with the rest of the team :)

Anyway please continue to report your feature requests, bugs and comments. Even if we don't respond or implement it all (we're busy people!) we do read everything you've got to say.