Introduction & Suggestion

[der_m]

Hello!
My name is Jonathan, or der_m. I got the opportunity to talk with
superfly on irc, and he was very helpful.
I am a Lutheran seminarian who is pretty passionate about Free
Software and copyleft content, especially as far as ministry and
worship is concerned. When I was neglecting study, I was planning to
start a project much like this one, and am therefore happy to have
stumbled onto it! God bless your work, and I hope to be able to help
with it sometimes!
My programming background isn't especially strong, but I can read code
and hunt down problem spots of alot of the time.

I had asked superfly 1) how you guys are saving music, then 2) IF you
guys are saving music? He said both were rather undecided. I'll toss
my suggestion into the hat, and please forgive me if it's already been
considered and abandoned.

I had originally planned on using lilypad for several reasons:
1) it's really just a markup language with renderer, which makes
storage minimal (text files or even gzip'd text files)
2) it allows variables, which would probably be useful for
"templating" as I understand it. For example, I was planning on
keeping the lyrics in one database field, the music (both chords and 4-
part "piano" notation) in another. Python scripts can call the
requested fields and dynamically pipe the desired music to be rendered
in lilypad. Thus, you can have just lyrics, lyrics with 4-part,
lyrics with chords, chords with 4-part, MIDI, etc. all rendered
dynamically rather than stored statically.
2a) this can also be useful if you need the lyrics independant of
music for openlp and the like, and just strip out the lilypad markup
in the stream.
2b) you already have a "popularity" function planned, which can also
be used to keep popular requests on hand and save CPU cycles for in-
demand music.
3) lilypad outputs to PostScript (which is an "easily" manipulated
markup language), PNG, MIDI, and PDF.
4) lilypad also imports from midi

So, the long and short of it is that you can keep music saved happily
on the server, while being able to treat both it and the lyrics as
comfortably as one would a text stream. I haven't yet put all this
into code, so I can't promise anything ;)
I haven't investigated opensong, yet, and can't speak to how happily
that can be imported/exported from/to lilypad markup. Again, though,
the relative "simplicity" of lilypad should make it comparatively
easy.

I should say, also, that my own project was primarily intended for
printing orders of worship and as a resource for musicians. Hence my
particular interest in the flexibility of lilypad's output, so that I
can integrate it with a formatted booklet with "tried and true"
PostScript converted to PDF. Some congregations also lack the funds
for a full-time musician and make use of MIDI to replace them, which
again is an advantage to the generated output of 4-part. I think it
would still be useful for your express goals, and I'm hoping that I
can actively contribute to the project.

Thanks for hearing me out, and may God bless your work for His greater
Glory!

der_m

[Scubes]

Welcome Jonathan!

Raoul and I chatted a bit about this. It actually sounds like a really
good suggestion. While doing a bit of searching on Google, I ran
across several web-based tools for use with lilypad. It certainly does
show promise.

It was my intention to be able to store items such as guitar chords, 4-
part sheet music, sheets for the choir members' folders, etc within
openworship. The idea is that if I am a music minister and I set up my
service just like I want it, then I can also go forward and select the
people that I want to do certain things. Perhaps I have a piece that
is only for a soloist and pianist. Each of these two people would have
accounts in openworship and would either be able to download the items
they need or have them automatically emailed to them in a PDF format.

In regards to the markup, I know that our music minister once used
software such as Finale to prep pieces that he either wrote or needed
to modify. I noticed in my search for lilypad that there seems to be
support for conversion of such output and lilypad.

I know that this is but the tip of the iceberg in reference to the
possibilities. But in short, I agree that there are certainly several
possible uses for this within openworship.

scubes13