The future of LIDA is rife with possibilities. In today’s post, I’d like to share with you several of the MAJOR upgrades we have looming in the future of LIDA, and I hope you will all be as excited by these possibilities as I am.

Concert Planning, Tracking, and Reporting

T his one is a biggie, and there has already been a LOT of discussion about it on our FORUM page. The current situation is that you can, in the current version of LIDA, enter the dates you played a particular listing in your library.

However, the possibilities of this capability are truly exciting. I’ll list a few of them here, and would love to hear from each of you what you think of them, whether we should include them in the LIDA upgrade, and what other ideas you have in this area.

SEASON PLANNING. This is the highest-level of overview, so we will start here. This idea would allow LIDA users to enter a Season designation, such as “The 2020-2021 Concert Season,” and then browse the library, designating various listings to be added to the season’s planning list. Basically, you could easily go through your library and say, “Oh! I’d like to play THAT one during this season!” Just click, and it would be added to the list. 

CONCERT PLANNING. In this feature, the LIDA user would first be able to designate concerts – first by date, and then – here’s where we need a lot of input from you – other information about the concert, such as a theme if you have one, the concert venue, the time of starting, and perhaps a few other nuggets of information about that concert.

Once you have designated the concerts, you will then be able to enter and edit your repertoire for that concert. To get your repertoire, you can select either from the Season Planning repertoire that you put together earlier, or select from your entire library. In the Query Results screen, if you have a specific designated concert you’re working on, that screen will then show a button that says “Add this tune to the current concert,” click it, and that tune will be added to that concert’s repertoire.

Another aspect of building your concert repertoire will be the ability to add tunes NOT in your library, such as those tunes borrowed from another organization or on loan from an individual. While this idea needs some more development, we are thinking it would be a good idea to be able to track the place from which you got any borrowed tunes.

When you have all your repertoire tunes in place for a concert, you will then be able to put the tunes into a concert order, which will be printable or exportable in a PDF or MS Word document format for use in other areas, such as to send to your concert program designer.

After the concert data has passed, you can still edit the concert listings to update them to reflect what actually happened at the concert. This would be handy if you suddenly added a last-minute tune, or were not able to play one of the tunes you had planned.

Next, the concert repertoire from past concerts would comprise the Play History for each tune in your library. (This Play History capability is already a part of LIDA.) This would allow LIDA users at a glance to see the date a particular tune was last played, and how many times you have played it over the years.

The final aspect of this feature – Concert Planning, Tracking, and Reporting – would be the ability to print out an ASCAP/BMI compliant report of all the tunes you have played during the previous year. For example, the Association of Concert Bands (www.ACBands.org) offers its members a blanket ASCAP/BMI Performance License, but requires all members to report which tunes they played. This CONCERT REPORTING capability in LIDA would make producing the ACB report one-click easy.

DISCUSSION please. Let us hear from you.

Program / Narrator Notes

T his is another feature requested by several on our Beta Test Team. A number of the team members have mentioned they would like to have the ability to put their program notes into the database with each tune.

There are several possibly ways to handle this, including using the Program Notes repository at www.SilverClefMusic.com, giving LIDA users the ability to embed a LINK to their program notes as external documents, or providing the space right inside LIDA and storing them there.

At this stage of development, I’m leaning towards allowing the storing of program notes directly in LIDA, because then we could create an interface with the Concert Planning, Tracking, and Reporting capability mentioned above, so users could create Program Notes documents automatically.

Here’s how this would work. First, the user would designate a concert. On the “Concert Information” screen, there would be a button, “Create Program Notes.” When the user clicks this button, the user would select whether to have the program notes formatted as continuous notes or as one page per tune, then click GO. LIDA would then create a listing for each tune in the concert’s repertoire, including the title, composer, and arranger, and if there were program notes entered for that tune, would then include those notes in the output. The output would be selectable as a text document or a MS Word document, either suitable for further editing.

So let us know – what are your thoughts about Program Notes in LIDA?

External File Links for Listings

O ne member of our Beta Test team requested the ability to store IMAGES, such as the scanned cover of the charts, in LIDA with each listing. This is definitely possible, but would require quite a bit of additional storage space if we stored the images themselves in LIDA.

Then another member asked about including PDF files, and yet another member asked about including Word documents. so I had to go do some research on how to do all this.

It turns out that it IS possible to attach links to external documents to records in LIDA, and now the question becomes just how and where do we do that?

My first thoughts are that we should have a link on the main listings pages: “External Links” and on that page allow the users to put a link to any file on their computer, an image, a PDF file, a Word document, a spreadsheet. Then later on, the user could select a listing from the library, click on that external link, and be taken directly to that file, which would open with whatever default program the user had set for that type of file.

The drawbacks to this are that it’s possible the user could move the file, or have to move to a different computer, in which case, all those links would be invalid. Second, if the user operated LIDA from different computers, or if there were several users, such as a music director and a couple of librarians, these links would not work for anyone except the original link-setter.

So those are some of the points to consider in adding this capability, and I can’t see any way around that unless we require all the referenced files to be in a specific location. (WordPress does this.)

So what do you think? Should we give LIDA the ability to link to external files? If so, then should we require them all to be in a specific location? Should we allow embedding images for each listing?

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

Sorting Titles NOT Considering “A” or “The”

H ere is another feature that’s been proposed, but as of this writing, we are undecided as to whether to include it or leave it out. First I’ll describe what it is, then give you some “so far” discussion, then ask for your thoughts on it.

Our most recent Beta Test Team member was informed by his own librarian that it is “standard procedure” to be able to enter titles exactly as they are on the tune, but then have them sorted WITHOUT considering any “A” or “The” at the beginning of the title.

In some discussion of this on our forum, it was brought up that another member often discounts several types of lead-in phrases, such as “Selections from…” or “The Best of…” or “Symphonic Suite from…” and needs to sort and search based merely on the keywords of the title.

Many of you have also noticed that our sample beta test database with more than 23,000 records in it has a number of listings that begin with spaces or punctuation marks of one sort or another, and this also plays havoc with the sort order.

While it is VERY doable to implement this sort of sorting control in LIDA, it would involve a significant amount of rather complex programming, and my first question is DO WE REALLY NEED THIS?

I mean, how many people are truly inconvenienced by “A” or “The,” and of those who ARE inconvenienced, how many already enter their titles in a sort-adjusted manner, such as “Sound of Music, Highlights from The”?

My answer to this, and admittedly, it’s an answer that saves me work, is to USE THE POWERFUL LIDA QUERY BUILDER. In this builder, you can enter a parameter like “Show me all the listings where the TITLE contains “Sound of Mu” and see ALL the proper results, such as “The Sound Of Music Symphonic Suite” and “Highlights from The Sound of Music” and “The Best of The Sound of Music” and even “The Sound of Muenster Cheese,” if you have such.

But before discarding this suggestion without action, I’d like to hear the thoughts of all our Beta Test team. So let me know. 

Tutorials, Tutorials!

There are text tutorials, In-LIDA tutorials such as the startup TIPS, popup tips, and on-screen helps, there are PDF tutorial documents and Word documents. But by far the best kind of tutorial (in my oh, so humble opinion) is a video tutorial.

We already have one video and two other tutorials posted on our site, here, but there are many, many others that need to be made.

And that’s where we need YOUR help. If you have run into a stumbling block with LIDA and think a video would help you get past it, let me know. If you have discovered something cool that you’d like to share, let me know. If you think of a specific topic that everyone needs to learn, let me know.

I probably won’t be able to get to them all right away, but putting together a list of what’s needed will be a good start.

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Thanks so much, everyone, for all your diligent work with LIDA and for your ideas and suggestions.

As I’ve said (often) throughout this posting: LET ME KNOW your thoughts on all these looming upgrades. This inquiring mind wants to know.