Smarter or tuneable copypaste import/export of setlist

Feature Requests
1

First of all, amazed by this plugin and can’t wait to take it on the road. Also amazed by the straightforward, fast and flexible implementations of feature requests that I’ve seen so far by Léo.

And lastly stunned about smart features like being able to copy and paste plain text into and out of the setlist editor, and especially how smart it recognizes abbreviations, half titles etc.

I do have some suggestions on how to make it even smarter. I’ve gotten errors when copypasting the setlist that our vocalist prepared with a number of reasons.

  1. Ableset doesn’t recognize or parse when a plain text title uses a different type of apostrophe than your Ableton/Ableset title. In this case it was a punctuation apostrophe ’ (the ‘floating comma’ kind) in the plain text title, versus a typewriter apostrophe ’ (the straight kind) which threw up an error
  2. The singer’s setlist had song duration written after the titles so those all threw up an error as well. The line ‘Footloose 3:47’ wasn’t consider to refer to the song Footloose.
  3. In the same vein, titles with additional text after it doesn’t get addressed as well. For instance, ‘Angels + Hey Jude’ (where we play an excerpt of Hey Jude without backing track, don’t judge us) won’t take up Angels in the setlist

I completely understand that it might break people’s flows if all this stuff is just by default ignored; simply ignoring any timecode in a line or validating a title just because the first word on a line matches a title would not be accepted by everyone. Maybe there are middle grounds to be found though, or better yet, laying in the hands of the users how imported plain text is parsed into the setlist.

Currently the documentation is relatively brief about this feature, mentioning that you can copypaste setlists and that it parses it for you. I get why, the ‘it just works’ vibes are strong with this one. But some more information on how it parses that content exactly would be a great start. Subsequently giving the user some settings to adjust this feature to their liking might help a lot. A checkbox that numbers and timecode can be safely ignored, a checkbox for more leniency concerning punctuation, or even a list that the user can provide to validate certain characters to be ignored or parsed as a different character.

Lastly, the error list when importing is something that disappears somewhat briefly and can’t be retrieved anymore. Perhaps the prompt can remain when mousing over and can be copypasted to do some more relaxed error-checking.

Hope my feedback helps the product and I’d love to see this quality-of-life improvement in an already amazing product. Thanks!

2

Hey @DrBackBeat, welcome to the forum!

Thanks a lot for the kind words and for the detailed feedback, it’s great to hear you’re enjoying AbleSet!

At the moment, each pasted line is matched against your song titles as a whole.
The matching is flexible with initials and partial titles, but extra content on the line, like a duration or a second song, is read as part of the title and gets in the way.

For that kind of extra info you can use curly braces. Text in curly braces next to a title is left out of the match and added as the song’s description instead:

Footloose {3:47}
Angels {+ Hey Jude}

You can also see it in action in the official tutorial.

I’ll pass along your suggestions about more lenient parsing options, more details in the docs, and keeping the error list around so it can be reviewed and copied.

Hope that helps!

3

Hey @DrBackBeat, thank you for your feedback!

I just released a new beta version that is more forgiving with matching imported setlists to songs in your project by normalizing all apostrophes and allows song names without apostrophes,
and by removing content that could be comments or other information gradually until it finds a match.

You can give it a try here if you like: AbleSet 3.2.0-beta.13