If you’ve been following me on Twitter (@javierplumey), you know that I am working on a new web app that will sync song arrangements from Planning Center Online (PCO) to a Dropbox folder.
Why?
I love PCO–it helps me manage my small team of worship musicians at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church in Ellicott City, MD. And it also maintains my growing database of songs. I remember back in the day when I used to lead music at San Isidro in Pompano Beach, Fl I used to have a very large binder that weighed about as much as a California Redwood. These days, with PCO as a central database for my songs and apps such as OnSong and forScore, I can keep everything on my iPad.
The issue is that there is no way to sync the chord charts and lyrics in Planning Center with the excellent OnSong music app on iOS. It doesn’t have a direct link with PCO (yet) so users must copy and paste out of the PCO web site and into text files which can then be synced into OnSong. I decided I would write a tool to perform this sync operation since it would save me a lot of time and keep my offline OnSong database up to date with the latest version of the chords for any song/arrangement combination in Planning Center.
I have worked out most of the code and am now putting on the final touches and integrating test scripts. I can currently sync all arrangements to my Dropbox folder. The sync is smart so that it only updates the files for the arrangements that have changed since the last sync. The sync will occur every hour unless you manually choose the sync option on the web site.
Here’s an example of a file created by the song process:
Please fill out this form if you’re interested in being a part of the beta testing. The site will be completely free.
Please follow me on Twitter if you want up-to-the-minute updates on the progress.
Help! I found your post – just starting tech with OnSong and PCO. I’m a 30 year developer, and looking for something to bridge the gap and help me sync. Would love to hear how best to help my little worship team at my church. I just tonight bought an iPad (4G, 16GB). First app I bought? OnSong. I have charts (mostly) in Google Drive. I know I can sync OnSong with ITunes and other sources, but would really like to have ONE spot for my charts.
Do I store on DropBox and sync with PCO?
Appreciate any help you can provide – we are a church plant, but I was the worship pastor at a BIG church (1500) in NoVA for years and want to start this out right.
Hi Brian!
My little project is still very much in ALPHA at the moment, and even when I do release it to the public, it’s going to be a one-way sync from PCO to Dropbox. I recommend you keep all of your charts in PCO since the charts will be accessible via the web and mobile devices. If you like, I can add you to the beta list so that you can receive early access to PCSS when I’m ready to release it. Good luck!
I’d love to the chance to get in on this. I was just in the process of manually copying a few, and looked into doing some regex matching on the arrangement urls. Was working on a quick autohotkey macro and thought I’d check to see if anyone has done something with this before. I’m not happy with the manual import process right now, onsong needs to sync, not just pull one song in at a time. It’s hard to manage and has made me consider going back to Music Stand. I need the offline access though. Anyway to include me, as I need to get a mass export/sync done soon? …. would appreciate it!