Large Song List Word or Excel solutions?

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MacOCD
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Joined: Wed Feb 24, 2016 1:18 am

Large Song List Word or Excel solutions?

Post by MacOCD »

What's the most efficient way to list a LARGE song collection on as few sides of paper and still have it look presentable?

I've bought several Karaoke collections on eBay (all original discs) and I'm in the process of ripping them to my kJams2 Mac at the moment.

I'm doing them in batches of around 100 CDs then curating & culling different versions of the same song to leave me with what I feel to be the best version. It's a slow process but I'm already up to around 3,500 unique songs and I'm wondering what the best template strategy is for listing a large collection of songs?

I understand that we have the wtKJams apps, and I've bought those, but I still feels there's nothing like being able to thumb through a list of songs rather than searching for a particular song or artist.

I'm on a Mac only, so the Windows based SongList creator programs aren't going to work for me.

I think it's going to need to be a template in Excel or Word, then printed to PDF. I want to get as many songs as I can per side of paper and I only really need Artist & Song, and ideally I'd like to format it with 2 column per page and lay it out:

Artist1 Song1
Song2
Song3
Song4
Artist2 Song1
Song2
Artist3 Song1
etc.

If the artist name needs to be on each line that would also be ok.

Can anyone share any tips/strategies to optimise the number of songs on a page while still making a nice looking list?

Is Excel, Word, Pages, Numbers Best for this?
What fonts do you use?
How Many columns?

Are there any templates available online you can recommend?

Thanks,
Mark.

Karanight
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Re: Large Song List Word or Excel solutions?

Post by Karanight »

I've done this using Pages and it wasn't difficult I did it in both A5 and A4 and I've done them with Artist and song first
Here's a view of the A5 book. The A4 book only had a single list on each page
Screenshot 2016-03-17 20.59.19.png
Posted by Len of LensKaraoke fame

Web site at
http://lenskaraoke.com

MacOCD
Posts: 36
Joined: Wed Feb 24, 2016 1:18 am

Re: Large Song List Word or Excel solutions?

Post by MacOCD »

Karanight wrote:I've done this using Pages and it wasn't difficult I did it in both A5 and A4 and I've done them with Artist and song first
Here's a view of the A5 book. The A4 book only had a single list on each page
That's the sort of thing. I've been trying to mock something up in Excel & Word to see what is most likely to work best and it seems Word/Pages will work better than the spreadsheet programs.

I'll probably do ARTIST - SONG as well as SONG - ARTIST lists. I think I'm going to need to do some clever scripted regex editing text file manipulation to create the type of layout I want to achieve.

With so many artists having names like "Miss My Name is Long ft. Someone else & Another Person" combined with tracks with long title names I'm going to try and not repeat the ARTIST name in each line... Something like this mockup (ignore the data, I formatted this by hand & copied & pasted to fill the page).

Image

I'm already aware that it'll be a challenge when artists span 2 column or pages, I may just have to manually tweak the list each time before saving, or use a combination or regex & MS Word Macros. I've not even started working out how to write the regex code to auto generate this yet (I'm a relative novice), I'm manually working out my optimum layout first.

Thanks for your help,
Mark.

Karanight
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Re: Large Song List Word or Excel solutions?

Post by Karanight »

Then I have two artist collaborating on a song I normally only list the most well know one and also I'll shorten some of the titles to make stuff fit on a line, but beware of falling into the trap of shortening the title on the song first list, it can be done but you need to think about how a singer will find a track if you've removed the first word of the title. For instance, the track by Tina Turner - Simply The Best, you could shorted the title to The Best in the list for artist first but for song first you need to put Simply The Best because that's what a singer will look for. Also I don't bother listing the Artist like you've done, if for instance I'll list Adele (my least favourite singer) as
Adele Funeral Dirge
Adele Depressing song
Adele What's the point of this song
etc
This way will take a little more room but not a lot and personally I think it looks better but that's purely a matter of opinion
Posted by Len of LensKaraoke fame

Web site at
http://lenskaraoke.com

DeusExMachina
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Re: Large Song List Word or Excel solutions?

Post by DeusExMachina »

FTR, most Windows song book creator apps work just fine on the Mac using Wine (free).

dave
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Re: Large Song List Word or Excel solutions?

Post by dave »

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