I just released a new beta version of AbleSet with new setlist management features, including the ability to split your setlist into multiple parts, add notes, and add songs multiple times.
Here’s a video showing the feature in action:
I’d love to get your feedback on this. Do you like the design, do you think it’s a good user experience? Is there anything you wish was different?
I’m really excited about beta 13’s new setlist features!
They made me think about the musical decisions involved in ordering songs. Berklee’s setlist guide discusses variety in key, groove, tempo, meter, instrumentation and story.
Taking that as a starting point, I have three ideas:
Optional song information while arranging the set. Show tempo, key and instrument tuning alongside the songs, plus optional user-entered energy, groove and mood. Having the same information in the song picker would help too. Reusing the existing tempo data would avoid maintaining BPM in a description, as discussed in the earlier tempo thread. Keeping key and tuning separate would also help spot guitar changes.
A compact overview of the musical flow. Separate tempo and manually rated energy views following the song order could make builds and quieter moments easier to see while rearranging. Two songs at 120 BPM can feel completely different. Missing ratings should simply remain blank.
An optional target duration per set or part. Building on the durations already shown, compare the planned total with a target: for example, “46:00 planned / 45:00 target / 1:00 over”. Timed notes would count towards this, while open-ended loops and estimated breaks should remain identifiable as uncertain.
I’d want these to stay optional, with a clean stage view.
Thanks for continuing to develop this — I’m looking forward to where it goes!
Features look cool. For ther song re-use it could happen by accident so I’d suggest having some visual indicator to show a song is in the set twice (where it appears in the set) - this would be useful for longer sets like the ones i typically build (45-60 songs).
For the notes - also very cool, it would be good to have a way of having my preset notes. I.e. “Set Break 20 Minutes”, “Singer Talk: 60 seconds”, “Guitarist Talk:60 seconds” etc. Attached is a recent version of our set that shows how we are using these for our shows. It works really well now that I have the workarounds created for our pauses and breaks (each break is a song that is 60 seconds long with lyrics counting down and i created multiple instances so I can have more than one “Break KB”). Notes would likely replace those though.