pySongBook preview (or: Am I Now a Programmer?)
6. juni, 2008
The first clue that you've graduated from being a clueless n00b to e l33t programmer is probably than when faced with a problem, you think: "I bet a could write a piece of software to overcome that.". Well I had that thought some months ago. Whether I was right is a whole different question.
The problem was that I was putting together a book of songs for the band I am playing in, as well as a book for taking to various summer activities, such as the Roskilde Festival. I tried just copy-pasting from scribbled notes as well as on-line sources, but the result was seldom beautiful. I would like to have a book, that is a. alphabetized, b. have a relatively uniform layout and c. where the songs could be added and a new songbook generated.
The solution to my problem is pySongBook, which has an editor that generates xml-files and a script that generates a songbook from a directory of xml-files. The xml-format is homemade and constantly evolving, devolvning and revolving. The interface of the editor is not the most intuitive in the world, but it seems to be slightly quicker than editing the xml by hand.
Screenshots and workflow:
First, you input the lyrics in the first tab:
Then you edit the structure and metadata of the song in the second tab:
Then you edit the chords for each individual line (time consuming):
And after generating, you end up with this result (screen-capture from pdf):
This looks somewhat pretty, I think. You can also take a look at the generated songbook, to check out the indexing and such.
If you think this looks interesting and want a look at the code, you can get it via bazaar. In ubuntu, you need the package bzr, and then you can type:
bzr branch http://bzr.kjoller.eu/pySongBookIf you have any ideas, feature requests or just plain old comments, you are very welcome to send them to me in this post or by e-mail (I think my e-mail address is in the TODO-file).